Experimental Study on the Effect of Pressure on Human Skin Temperature and Heart Rate

Since thermal comfort is becoming a frontier science combined with pyrology, architectural physics, physiology and psychology, as human important physiological indexes, skin temperature and heart rate variation are explored for the thermal comfort study in low-pressure environment. Important information of human thermal balance and thermal sensation can be obtained by testing the skin temperature, the change of heart rate (HR) can reflect human metabolic rate-an important influencing factor on human thermal comfort. Experiments were performed to investigate how these physiological factors respond to the environmental temperatures, especially pressure, and what is the relationship between skin temperature and heart rate variation (HRV) and thermal comfort. The respond of human skin temperature and HR to pressure and their influence on human mean thermal sensation (MTS) were studied by questionnaire and controlled experiments in the asymptomatic altitude reaction regions. The experimental results indicate that mean skin temperature and HR all decrease with the pressure drop when other environmental parameters kept constant, and MTS has the same tendency. It provides certain physiological basis for human thermal comfort study under low pressure.