Does your office make you feel worse? Linking environmental exposure and temporal factors to cognitive symptoms

Symptoms such as fatigue, headache, low motivation, and difficulty concentrating affect office workers’ cognitive and overall well-being. This study investigates the dynamic relationships among temporal patterns, indoor environmental quality (IEQ) factors, and cognitive symptoms in real offices. We collected about four months of continuous environmental data and ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) from ten office workers and integrated XGBoost and SHAP analysis to identify those relationships. Model performance varied by symptom and participant. Under random train-test splitting, accuracy generally exceeded 70% with F1 scores ranging from 40% to 80%. Performance declined under a temporal split, highlighting the real-world challenge of predicting future symptom states from past observations. Based on SHAP analysis, hour of day and day of week emerged as significant predictors, revealing temporal patterns in cognitive symptoms. Within observed one-hour windows prior to reported symptoms, higher relative humidity was generally associated with increased risk of cognitive symptoms, while higher illuminance was associated with reduced symptom risk. Associations with sound pressure level and TVOCs varied across participants, with no consistent directions. Our data-driven approach provides insights into temporal factors and environmental exposures associated with cognitive symptoms using naturalistic data. These findings highlight the combined influence of temporal and IEQ factors on cognitive symptoms and contribute to the development of adaptive, user-centric workplaces that support cognitive well-being management.