Healthy Buildings
We believe that the most important aspect of the burgeoning healthy buildings movement is ensuring that the research and its application benefit everyone, everywhere. The Harvard Healthy Buildings program aims to harness the power of research, business collaboration, and commonsense messaging to advance solutions for public health within the built environment. The team’s research centers around six focus areas, spanning from healthy homes and materials to infectious disease control and climate solutions. Within all these areas, we provide user-friendly tools, resources, guides, and calculators to empower people to apply the latest research on healthy buildings to their everyday lives.
Find our tools, guides, and other resources at forhealth.org
9 Foundations of a Healthy Building
To reduce complexity and provide guidance for solution-focused actions, the team has developed the “9 Foundations of a Healthy Building.” The framework defines clear and actionable core elements that comprise a healthy indoor environment.
The idea for the “The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building” arose from many interactions over the past several years with real estate professionals, building owners, hospital administrators, facilities directors, homeowners, and academic colleagues. Two things stood out:
- First, during these discussions, we would often say, “The idea of a healthy building has been made too complicated. We know how to make buildings healthy. There are a few simple foundations.” This led to requests to name the foundations of a healthy building. In the ensuing discussion and debate we realized that we must translate our research into actionable information.
- Second, in these presentations and meetings we would often hear, “Your research is very interesting, but I can’t take a scientific paper into my meeting on Monday and convince a building owner or manager to do things differently. I need a short summary.
Thus, the 9 Foundations project was born.
AppLab: the research app
Created for researchers, by researchers, the AppLab platform helps you create your own custom research app, putting every aspect of conducting a study at your fingertips. You can monitor your research subjects and analyze their responses on the ForHealth dashboard, without ever leaving the office. The platform simplifies the recruitment and retention of participants too, by allowing them to provide data through a fun, interactive app.
