Temperature and air share one module for a specific reason: an air problem is routinely felt as heat. A closed room that has run out of fresh air reads as “stuffy and hot,” so people reach for the thermostat when the real fix is fresh air. This module’s spine is measure first, then act on the right lever — read the air, cool the room to the sleep target, and ventilate. Three highest-leverage Reversible moves, then a route into the Bedroom Design Guide for the structural layer.
This module covers two channels that behave as one in a closed room: thermal comfort and air quality. They sit together because of a specific, well-documented confusion — an air problem is routinely felt as heat. A room that has run out of fresh air reads as “stuffy and hot,” so the instinct is to reach for the thermostat, when the real fix is to open a window. Solve the temperature without the air, or the air without recognising it was mistaken for temperature, and you leave the occupant adjusting the wrong lever. So the module’s spine is measure first, then act on the right lever: read the air, cool the room to the sleep target, and ventilate.
You will finish with three Reversible moves you can make this week — measure the air, cool the room, and get fresh air through it — plus a clear read on which your situation needs. The thermal sleep arm is the bedroom; the air-quality arm (monitoring, ventilation, filtration) applies room-agnostic, and the home office is the second room it serves. The heavier, room-changing moves — insulation, glazing, a heat-recovery ventilator, mechanical ventilation — route to your Bedroom Design Guide and, at building scale, to [ARR-01 §5]. The noise arm of the sleep environment routes to the Acoustic module and the circadian-light arm to the Circadian module; both are named here where they matter, because a bedroom is one room and you meet all of it at once.
There are published recommendations for both halves of this module — an occupied-comfort band and a sleep-onset target for temperature (WELL v2 T01), and ventilation and pollutant limits for air (WHO 2021; ASHRAE 62.1; WELL v2 Air). The catch is that the ordinary thermal baseline was derived in the general population, and it under-serves and can actively harm the readers this module is built for. The neurodivergent thermal comfort band is narrower, so a room that drifts a couple of degrees spends more of the day outside it; and for the POTS and hypermobility cohort a common “comfortable” 22–23 °C sits above the ≤ 21 °C ceiling their physiology needs — directionally wrong for the very people the room is meant to serve. Sensori’s position is a tightening within the recognised standards, not a departure from them: the same WELL / WHO / ASHRAE numbers, applied more strictly at the sensitive end, not softer house figures invented in their place.
You may have arrived here by more than one route. Thermal is one of the eight sensory domains the results chart scores — visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, thermal, proprioceptive, vestibular, interoceptive — so you may have a thermal bar you can actually see. The air-quality half has no bar of its own: it sits under the olfactory domain and the sleep and stuffy-room questions. So you may have landed here from a thermal score, from an olfactory score, from telling the quiz that poorly-ventilated or stuffy rooms affect you, or from a chronic-illness or sleep flag that routes the thermal and air supports together — because in a closed room they are one problem. If none of that sounds like you, this module is safe to skip.
Sensori reads sensory processing on Dunn’s four-quadrant model — Sensitivity, Avoiding, Seeking and Low Registration, the four cards below. Where those quadrants don’t resolve to a single lead, the results screen reports one of two composite states instead: Managing (you register strongly and actively compensate — Sensitivity and Avoiding at once) or Variable (three or more quadrants elevated, no dominant pattern). On this channel the quadrants describe your relationship to temperature and air specifically.
You notice and are affected by temperature and air other people don’t register — the room two degrees too warm, the stuffiness that creeps in by mid-afternoon, the draught crossing the back of your neck. From the outside it can look like fussiness; from the inside, small drifts in temperature or air genuinely cost you focus and sleep, because the neurodivergent comfort band is narrower and thermal discomfort shares neural pathways with pain. The priority is removing the load at the source: a narrow, stable, cool band and a fresh-air path, rather than tolerating a room that sits just outside comfortable.
You already manage this actively — you add and shed layers, you crack a window, you run a fan, you leave the room that has gone stuffy. The moves in this module are mostly the structural version of what you are already doing by hand: making the cool-stable band and the fresh-air path hold on their own, so you are not correcting the room by feel every hour of the day and night.
You reach for warmth — the heater turned up, the hot bath, the heavy layers, the sealed room — because warmth feels regulating and settling. That is a real need, but turned up in the whole room it can push past the sleep target and seal the space against fresh air. So the move is not “go cold” but decouple the warmth you seek from the room’s air: warm the surfaces and contact (a warm foot, a heated throw) while keeping the ambient cool and the air moving. This is the quadrant the thermal channel most often under-serves, so it gets named plainly.
You miss cues others use automatically — you don’t notice the stuffiness climbing, or that the room has gone cold enough to matter. That carries two real safety angles: a CO₂ buildup you cannot feel (the monitor is the substitute for the sense you don’t get — especially if reading your own body’s signals is hard), and a dangerous cold or a hot surface that burns before you register it. The priority is making the invisible legible: a monitor for the air, a thermometer at bed height, and hard limits on how hot or cold a surface is allowed to get.
Most people present mixed — noticing the stuffiness and the drift without managing them, or seeking warmth in a room that is also under-ventilated, are common patterns, and the three Section 04 moves are built to serve them together. The section addresses sensitivity and avoiding as its primary thread; where warmth-seeking and low-registration change the emphasis, the cards say so.
If you did not take the quiz, this module is useful if you regularly: feel a room is too warm or stuffy when others are comfortable; get an afternoon fog or a dull headache in a closed room that lifts the moment you step outside; sleep badly in a warm bedroom; feel the cold in your hands and feet far more than seems reasonable; or run hot and cold in a way that breaks up focus and sleep. Those are the daily signs of a narrow thermal band and an under-ventilated room, which is what this module addresses.
If you live with a chronic condition that dysregulates temperature — POTS or another dysautonomia, hypermobility (hEDS), Raynaud’s phenomenon, mast-cell activation (MCAS) or chemical sensitivity, or ME/CFS — this channel is directly load-bearing for you, and the ordinary “comfortable room” advice can be wrong in your case. Section 03 carries the mechanism at both ends of the band (heat worsens POTS; cold triggers Raynaud’s), and a caveat on how far Sensori will and won’t go on the contested constructs — see On MCAS and MCS as clinical constructs. This module treats these as design variables, not diagnoses: you do not need a label to act on any of it, and where the pattern is significant it routes to a GP, not to a product.
Chronic-illness sleep specifically — where pain, temperature instability and autonomic arousal fragment the night — has its mechanism and its wider environmental supports at [SPR-01 §13], which this module draws on for the thermal arm.
This module rests on a small, consistent evidence base. The thermal mechanism and the neurodivergent comfort band come from [SPR-01 §06e] and [NDR §6], underwritten by WELL v2 T01 and PAS 6463:2022; the air-quality picture from [NDR §9a], the WHO 2021 Global Air Quality Guidelines, ASHRAE 62.1:2022 and the WELL v2 Air Concept. Two honest notes up front. The controlled CO₂-and-cognition evidence was gathered in daytime office settings, so the overnight-bedroom and home-office readings are Sensori’s extension of that mechanism plus the ventilation standards, not direct residential trials. And that evidence is narrower than its reputation: the widely quoted decision-making result comes from one chamber study of 22 university students on a single proprietary test, a direct replication of it found nothing, and the settled part of the literature is about ventilation rather than about carbon dioxide itself. The recommendation is the same either way — get fresh air into the room — but we would rather you knew which part is solid.
Temperature is sensed by TRP-family receptors in the skin — TRPV1 for heat, TRPM8 for cold — whose signals travel the same spinothalamic pathway that carries pain. That shared architecture is why an out-of-comfort temperature can register as genuinely aversive rather than merely disagreeable: for these profiles it is closer to a low-grade pain signal than to a matter of taste. On top of this, the research on autistic thermal processing finds the comfort band — the range within which temperature reads as neutral — is consistently narrower than in the general population, so an ordinary room that drifts a couple of degrees spends more of the day outside the neutral zone.
And in a subset of autistic people, and characteristically in hypermobility (hEDS), autonomic thermoregulation — the vasodilation and vasoconstriction that normally hold core temperature steady — is less efficient, so the body cannot correct for a poorly held room on its own. The environment has to do more of the thermal work, not less. A room left at a “normal” 22–23 °C, or allowed to drift through the day, keeps a narrow-band occupant under continuous low-grade regulatory load — which surfaces as irritability, fatigue, restlessness or difficulty concentrating, and is routinely misread as mood, motivation or “being difficult” rather than as a thermal problem.
The design consequence is that you hold a narrow, stable, cool band rather than chasing a single perfect number, and you prioritise stability over peak set-point — an unexpected swing costs more than a steady degree of imperfection. Give the occupant point-of-occupancy control (a layer, a fan, a foot-warmer) on top of the zone setting, and prefer radiant warmth — warm surfaces, which lift the operative temperature the body actually feels — over blown convective air, which doubles as a tactile draught.
Sensori position. For neurodivergent profiles, ambient temperature is a regulatory load, not a comfort preference. Where autonomic thermoregulation is impaired it is a compensation for a physiological limit, not an accommodation of fussiness — which is why Sensori treats the thermal band as a design target on par with light and sound, not as a thermostat afterthought.
The 22 °C room that is quietly costing you all afternoon. Your home office sits at a perfectly normal 22 °C. Nothing is wrong you could point to — but by mid-afternoon you are irritable, foggy, shifting in your seat, and you put it down to the work or your mood. The room drifted a degree over the morning and has sat just past the edge of your band for hours, holding you under a load you never named. It read as “I’m having a bad day.” It was the room.
That is one half of the module. The other is the load that is felt as heat but is not thermal at all — and the two are so easily confused that they belong in one place.
As a room fills with people — or a single sleeper over a night — exhaled CO₂ and bioeffluents (the other by-products a body gives off) accumulate unless fresh outside air dilutes them. In controlled human-exposure studies, an under-ventilated room measurably costs cognitive performance: the best-supported finding, from a review of 37 experimental studies, is that low ventilation slows the speed of mental work while leaving accuracy intact. CO₂ is the reading that tells you the room is under-ventilated — a high number means fresh-air delivery is inadequate, and other accumulated pollutants (VOCs, particulates) are likely high too. Whether the CO₂ molecule itself impairs thinking at these levels is genuinely contested: the well-known chamber study found decrements in decision-making at 1,000 ppm in 22 university students, but a direct replication using the same test found no effect in submariners even at fifteen times that concentration. We have written the target around the thing that is settled — ventilate the room. The load is paid whether or not it is noticed — CO₂ has no smell, and the neurodivergent olfactory system does not fade a stale-air load into non-perception the way the reassurance “you get used to the room” assumes.
The critical link to temperature is that the whole load is felt as stuffiness and warmth — and humidity above about 60 % genuinely inflates the perceived temperature — so an air problem is routinely experienced, and misdiagnosed, as a thermal one. An under-ventilated closed room, a bedroom by morning or a home office by mid-afternoon, produces fog, restlessness, unrefreshing sleep and a “hot, stuffy” feeling. The occupant reaches for the thermostat, cools the room, and the real cause persists, because a couple of degrees of air temperature was never the problem: the air itself was.
The way out is to measure, which breaks the misattribution — a monitor separates a stuffy-and-hot room from a hot-but-fresh one — and then to run the hierarchy of controls: remove sources, ventilate with fresh outside air (the middle tier no filter substitutes for), filter the residual particulate and chemical load, and hold relative humidity in the 40–60 % band. Do not answer an air problem with the thermostat.
Sensori position. Air quality and thermal comfort are one design problem in a closed room, because they are systematically confused: the same stuffiness a monitor would call a CO₂ problem is felt as heat. Sensori treats them as a paired channel for exactly this reason — solving the temperature without the air, or the air without recognising it was mistaken for temperature, leaves the occupant adjusting the wrong lever.
The stuffy bedroom you keep turning the aircon down in. You wake at 3 a.m. hot and thick-headed and nudge the aircon down another degree. It helps for twenty minutes, then you are hot again. The room is not hot — a night of your own breathing has pushed the CO₂ up and the air has gone stale, and stale air feels like heat. You have spent the night cooling a room whose problem was never its temperature. The window, not the thermostat, was the fix.
Both mechanisms sharpen at the two ends of the comfort band, where chronic illness makes the room load-bearing in opposite directions at once.
At the warm end, POTS and other dysautonomias respond to heat with vasodilation, which worsens the venous pooling and reduced venous return that drive their symptoms; heat intolerance is a common feature, and a cool, stable ambient with cooling access matters physiologically, not as a preference. Hypermobility (hEDS) co-occurs with autonomic dysregulation and sits under the same demand. At the cold end, Raynaud’s phenomenon — common in the same connective-tissue and autonomic cluster — responds to cold contact and rapid cooling with digital vasospasm, so cold floors, cold metal hardware and draughts on the extremities are the trigger. In severe ME/CFS, sensory hyperresponsivity pushes the room toward a controllable, cool, stable sensory-retreat specification, and post-exertional load compounds any thermal stress.
The tension the designer must hold is that these constraints point in opposite directions on air temperature. A room set to a generic “comfortable” 22–23 °C — the warm end of the WELL v2 T01 band, where an ordinary thermostat often sits — is at or above the ≤ 21 °C ceiling the POTS and hEDS cohort needs, and keeps them symptomatic: directionally wrong for the very people the room is meant to serve. Set the same room cold enough for POTS and a Raynaud’s occupant’s hands and feet drop into vasospasm on the cold floor and hardware. Neither end is served by a single air-temperature number.
The resolution is not a compromise set-point but three things at once: hold a cool, stable ambient (≤ 21 °C in occupied spaces for the POTS/hEDS cohort, 18–24 °C at sleep onset with the upper bound load-bearing) and give cooling access, while warming the contact surfaces and protecting the extremities for the cold end — warm floor and seat, no cold metal at hand height, no draught on the feet. Add point-of-occupancy control so the occupant can correct locally, avoid radiant heat sources near a POTS occupant, and eliminate rapid warm-to-cold transitions. Cool air plus warm surfaces plus local control — not one number.
Sensori position. The chronic-illness thermal case is not covered by any single “comfortable” temperature: the two ends of the band are bound by opposite physiological constraints, and a competent design holds both at once rather than splitting the difference. Sensori states the ≤ 21 °C occupied ceiling for the dysautonomia cohort explicitly, because the common-sense “warm is cosy” default is directionally wrong for them.
Some of those conditions sit inside a live diagnostic debate, so one note on how far Sensori goes before the numbers.
MCAS and MCS are real, disabling, and diagnostically contested — and Sensori neither diagnoses them nor adjudicates the debate. Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) has an international consensus framework but an unresolved criteria debate: a narrow set requires objective evidence of mast-cell-mediator elevation during episodes plus a response to mast-cell-directed therapy, while a broader, more symptom-based set is used by other clinicians — and the two identify substantially different populations. Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS, also termed Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance) is more contested still: the symptoms are real and disabling, but there is no agreed organic mechanism. The two overlap heavily — in the one clinical series screened for both, the majority of MCAS patients also screen positive for chemical intolerance — which is why Sensori treats them as one trigger-reduction design problem rather than adjudicating them apart.
What Sensori commits to is a set of environmental design heuristics that hold their value independent of where the debate settles: control humidity and remediate mould, specify low-emission materials, run a scent-free default, filter the residual particulate and chemical load, and hold the air cool and stable. Every one of those moves is low-risk and broadly beneficial, so the design does not need the diagnosis resolved to be worth doing.
Scope of practice. Sensori reduces the load a named trigger imposes; it does not diagnose MCAS or MCS, recommend medication or elimination protocols, or claim its changes treat the condition. A presentation indicating possible MCAS or a significant environmental sensitivity routes to a GP and onward to a clinical immunologist or allergist; visible mould or a damp problem routes to professional assessment and remediation before design, because remediation is a prerequisite and disturbing established mould without containment can worsen exposure. In Australia the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 covers disabling environmental sensitivities as reasonable-adjustment grounds regardless of the diagnostic label.
These are Sensori’s canonical thermal and air-quality defaults, the same figures used across the design guides and audits. They describe a cool, stable, well-ventilated, low-emission room. The Sensori position is that the neurodivergent case tightens these standards rather than departing from them: the numbers are the recognised WELL / WHO / ASHRAE / building-science targets, applied more strictly at the sensitive end, not invented. One figure the panel deliberately leaves as a principle rather than a fixed row is the pre-sleep cooling lead time: the reference layer disagrees on the exact minute, so the panel commits only to the target temperature and “reach it before you get into bed” — the temperature card gives a practical working start of about 90 minutes, but treat the minute as approximate.
Reading the abbreviations. CO₂ is carbon dioxide, in parts per million (ppm). PM2.5 is fine particulate matter under 2.5 microns, in micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m³). TVOC is total volatile organic compounds (off-gassing from materials and cleaning products); HCHO is formaldehyde, one specific VOC. RH is relative humidity, as a percentage. CADR is a purifier’s clean-air delivery rate — how much filtered air it actually moves, matched to room size. HEPA is the high-efficiency particulate filter grade; MERV is the rating scale for the coarser filters in ducted systems. NDIR (non-dispersive infrared) is the sensor type that measures CO₂ directly, as opposed to a cheaper “eCO₂” estimate.
These specifications are Sensori’s canonical defaults across modules, design guides and B2B audit deliverables. The panel covers the full tier ladder so it stays useful when you cross-route into a design guide: the Reversible moves (thermostat schedule, CO₂ monitor, ventilation, purifier) sit here, and the Semi-Permanent and Permanent moves — insulation, glazing, a heat-recovery ventilator, mechanical ventilation — route to your Bedroom Design Guide and, at building scale, to [ARR-01 §5]. A poorly insulated or west-facing room defeats these targets regardless of fit-out.
The panel above is the general case. Five conditions move it, and they matter because a generic “comfortable” room is wrong for several of them in opposite directions:
The chronic-illness mechanism and its wider environmental supports are set out at [SPR-01 §13a, §13d].
A closing word on how firm this evidence is. The narrowed-comfort-band and autonomic-thermoregulation claims come from autism research stated in the reference layer with limited inline primary citation, so they are carried here as design heuristics rather than standard-backed effect sizes; their extension to ADHD and AuDHD is by mechanism, not separate trials. The CO₂-and-cognition evidence is office-derived, and the direct cognitive effect at everyday indoor levels is only partly replicated — which is why the ventilation case rests as much on CO₂ as a reliable proxy for stale-air load as on the cognitive effect itself. And where the sources disagree on the exact pre-sleep cooling lead time, the defaults panel fixes no canonical figure; the temperature card gives a practical working start of about 90 minutes, but the minute is approximate. The design moves hold regardless, because each addresses a distinct failure mode and none depends on the precise calibration of the others.
These are the three highest-leverage thermal-and-air moves at the Reversible tier — no fixings, no trades, no permission required, and nothing that costs a renter their bond. They are not three versions of one thing: they are one diagnosis and two responses. Measure the air, cool the room, get fresh air through it. The order is the point — read the air first, because that resolves the stuffy-or-hot misattribution the whole module turns on, then act on whichever lever the reading calls for. Unlike a stack that only works whole, each response earns its place on its own; the monitor tells you which one your room needs.
What has been left out routes elsewhere. Insulation, double glazing, a heat-recovery ventilator and mechanical ventilation are Semi-Permanent and Permanent moves that live in your Bedroom Design Guide. The room’s noise is the Acoustic module’s; its circadian light is the Circadian module’s. And if your bedroom is west-facing or poorly insulated, some heat will beat any Reversible treatment — that is a project constraint for [ARR-01 §5], not a design failure on your part.
Ordered measure-first, not by the hierarchy of controls: the monitor leads because it diagnoses (and stops money going to the wrong fix), the temperature set-point comes second as the highest-certainty single response, and ventilation third — the free response the monitor most often points to.
Some of the product links in the cards below are affiliate links — Sensori Design earns a small commission at no cost to you. All recommended products are selected on merit against the evidence criteria in this module, not on the commercial relationship.
You cannot smell CO₂, and a closed room’s air degrades in a way that feels like tiredness, restlessness or “I just can’t think in here” — not like bad air. In controlled human-exposure studies, low ventilation slows the speed of mental work, and CO₂ is the accessible reading of it: a high number means fresh-air delivery is inadequate and other pollutants are likely high too. A monitor turns that invisible load into a number, so you can tell whether the problem is you or the room.
Its leverage is diagnostic, not corrective — it changes nothing about the air on its own. What it does is separate a stuffy-and-hot room from a hot-but-fresh one, and separate the room from you, so the right (and often free) response gets applied instead of a wrong one — and it stops money going to a purifier that a $0 open window would have fixed. Prioritise it before spending on any air device, and especially if reading your own body’s signals is hard: the monitor does the sensing your interoception may not.
Sleep onset requires your core body temperature to drop, and the bedroom’s ambient temperature is the primary environmental lever for it — as sleep approaches, the body dilates the blood vessels in the skin, especially the hands and feet, to shed heat, and a cool room speeds that heat loss, which pulls core temperature down and cues sleep. That is why the room temperature in the roughly 90 minutes before you get in is the lever, not the temperature once you are already asleep.
This matters more, not less, for profiles whose autonomic thermoregulation cannot do the work unaided — autistic, hEDS, POTS and stimulant-medicated ADHD, where the environment has to carry the load the body can’t. Prioritise it universally; it is one of the highest-leverage single levers in the room.
A closed bedroom is one of the most under-ventilated rooms in a home — CO₂ and bioeffluents build up overnight, and an under-ventilated room slows mental work the next day — a load you cannot smell at all. Fresh-air dilution is the middle tier of the hierarchy of controls (source removal → ventilation → filtration), and no filter substitutes for it: a filter recirculates and cleans particulates, but only ventilation actually replaces the air and carries out the CO₂ and bioeffluents.
This is the free response the monitor most often points to. A modern weather-stripped bedroom is more air-tight than an older one, so “I aired it earlier” is not the same as continuous supply through the night. Prioritise it if your door and window stay closed overnight, the room feels stuffy by morning, or you wake unrefreshed in a room that seemed fine at bedtime.
A sleeper who under-registers cues has two blind spots this module has to name, because both are safety matters, not comfort ones. The first is air: CO₂ and stale-air load climb without being felt, so the room’s cost is paid unnoticed — the CO₂ monitor is the substitute for the sense you don’t get, and it is doing real work precisely because your body isn’t flagging the problem. The second is cold: thermal hyposensitivity means a dangerously cold room, or a hot surface, may not register in time — hypothermia risk at one end, contact burns at the other. The answer is not to abandon the cool, ventilated room, which serves you; it is to make the invisible legible and put hard limits on it — a monitor for the air, a thermometer at bed height, a thermostatic limit on any heated surface, and a floor temperature the room is not allowed to drop below. One caution matters most for this profile: a CO₂ or air-quality monitor is not a carbon-monoxide alarm — if you burn gas, wood or fuel, fit a separate CO alarm, because carbon monoxide is an acute poison you also will not feel. Register what you cannot feel, and cap what could harm you.
These three are the Reversible tier. When you have measured, cooled and ventilated and the air still isn’t where you want it, the next Reversible step is filtration — a HEPA-plus-activated-carbon purifier sized to the room’s clean-air delivery rate (CADR) — which is also the move for a bad-air day, when bushfire smoke or high pollen means you close the windows and let the purifier carry the room. If humidity or mould is the problem, that has its own lever: hold relative humidity in the 40–60 % band, and remediate any visible mould before anything else. The structural layer above all of this — insulation, double glazing, a heat-recovery ventilator, mechanical ventilation — is Semi-Permanent and Permanent, and it lives in your Bedroom Design Guide, which carries the full ladder for the room. Where the constraint is the building itself — a west-facing or uninsulated bedroom no reversible move fully solves — that is an architectural question for [ARR-01 §5], worth naming as a project constraint rather than something a thermostat was ever going to solve.
The three moves are one diagnosis and two responses, so they combine in two specific ways worth knowing before you start: the monitor and the air response are a pair, and the two responses hold the module’s central tension.
The three Reversible moves are above. When you are ready for the structural layer, these are the forward-pointers into your Bedroom Design Guide and the architectural reference.
The Bedroom Design Guide carries the full tier ladder for the room — insulation and glazing, a heat-recovery ventilator, mechanical ventilation and filtration, and the acoustic and circadian moves that share the space — with the room-specific implementation this module points toward.
Reading order is module first (channel-level mechanism + Reversible action), then the design guide for the room you spend the most time in (full tier ladder, room-specific implementation).
Evidence basis. The thermal comfort band, the TRP/spinothalamic pain overlap and the autonomic-thermoregulation claims are drawn from [SPR-01 §06e] and [NDR §6], underwritten by WELL v2 T01 and PAS 6463:2022; the narrowed-band and autonomic claims are carried at the reference layer’s stated citation strength, as design heuristics rather than trial-backed effect sizes. The sleep-onset range (18–24 °C, the ceiling load-bearing) is set from measured-sleep field evidence via [SPR-01 §13] — Raja et al. 2026 for the consistent degradation above roughly 25 °C, Baniassadi et al. 2023 for total sleep time falling from 22 °C upward, Caballero-Gomez et al. 2025 for the 26–35 °C range, Deng, Victoria & Ucci 2024 for the 18 °C precautionary floor, and Okamoto-Mizuno & Mizuno 2012 for the bedding condition; Harding 2019 supplies the core-cooling mechanism only and names no bedroom target. This paragraph previously read "The sleep-onset target (17–19 °C) is Harding 2019 via [SPR-01 §13]", an attribution withdrawn at Session 287. Sensori does not adopt the published 26 °C overheating threshold, which is a thermal-comfort acceptability criterion rather than a sleep specification. The air-quality figures are the WHO 2021 Global Air Quality Guidelines (PM2.5 under 5 annual / 15 24-hour), ASHRAE 62.1:2022 for ventilation, and the WELL v2 Air Concept (CO₂, TVOC, formaldehyde), via [NDR §9a]; the CO₂-and-cognition mechanism is the Allen 2016 / Satish 2012 controlled-exposure programme, office-derived and applied to the residential and overnight case by extension. The chronic-illness mechanism is [SPR-01 §06e, §13b, §13c, §13d] — Eccles 2024 for POTS and hEDS, Wigley & Flavahan 2016 for Raynaud’s. Full bibliographic detail lives in the Sensori citation database.
Scope of practice. This is design guidance, not clinical advice — Sensori does not diagnose and does not adjudicate the MCAS or MCS diagnostic debate. It reduces the load a named environmental trigger imposes; it does not claim its changes treat any condition. A presentation indicating possible MCAS or a significant environmental or chemical sensitivity is a reason to see a GP, with onward referral to a clinical immunologist or allergist. Visible mould or a damp problem routes to professional assessment and remediation before design — remediation is a prerequisite, and disturbing established mould without containment can worsen exposure. Where a chronic condition (POTS, dysautonomia, ME/CFS) drives severe heat or cold intolerance, that is a medical matter alongside the environmental supports here. One disambiguation that matters for safety: this module concerns carbon dioxide (CO₂), a cognitive and comfort load — not carbon monoxide (CO), an acute poison. A CO₂ or air-quality monitor is not a carbon-monoxide alarm; any home that burns gas, wood or fuel needs a separate, standards-compliant CO alarm. In a workplace or education setting — where a duty-holder such as an employer or education provider exists — personal-scale environmental adjustments of this kind are among those the duty-holder may be required to make as reasonable adjustments under the DDA 1992 (Cth); the changes this module specifies for your own home (a CO₂ monitor, a purifier, a cool and ventilated room) carry no such legal standing, because there is no duty-holder. Readers with multiple-domain flagging, severe presentations, or unusual constraints can email hello@sensoridesign.com.au — one-on-one consultancy is an option where the design-guide path leaves the situation unresolved.
This is a Sensori intervention module — a free channel-anchored profile-education + Reversible-tier action surface. See sensoridesign.com.au for the full library, including paid design guides for room-by-room implementation.