Skin temperature - and its relationship to thermal comfort

Localized discomfort of the human body - or over-generalized discomfort

It is not very common to discuss the localized thermal discomfort with quantifiable measures. Traditionally, thermal comfort is expressed as either a vote-like metric such as Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) or temperature-like metric such as physiologically equivalent temperature (PET). Using environmental parameters (air temperature, relative humidity, mean radiant temperature and air velocity) and personal variables (metabolic rate and clothing factor), the human body is modelled either as a two-node heat budget model where the surface of the occupants are assumed to be at consistent temperature. Localised differences of the state of thermal comfort, or local thermal discomfort, is only discussed in the existing standards as ‘unwanted cooling or heating of one particular part of the body’, and known to be primarily caused by draught, vertical air temperature difference, warm and cool floors and radiant asymmetry. For practical purposes, the more recent engineering reserach challenge these assumptions by accounting for the actual effects of smaller-area radiant cooling or low-speed draft can be caused by improperly retrofitted construction joints (Craenendonck, 2019), or the gender-based thermal sensitivity (Schellen, 2012 - The influence of local effects on thermal sensation under non-uniform environmental conditions).

There have been less precedents regarding the different sensitivity to thermal stimulations in previous studies. Choi studied the localized sensitivity of the human body on 10 key locations and determined that the wrist is one of the most