Allostatic Habitat Modulation: A Proposed Discipline for Physiology-Based, Multi-Domain Regulation of Indoor Exposure across the Life of the Habitat

Humans spend most of their lives in built environments. Light, air quality, thermal conditions, noise, and other indoor factors act on physiological and behavioural processes; however, the knowledge describing these effects remains distributed across disciplines and building subsystems that are commonly designed and operated separately. Building control research already acknowledges the need to integrate domains, to make the arbitration between conflicting objectives transparent, and to remain sensitive to occupant preferences. This paper organises those requirements into an explicit framework articulating three fields at the scale of the inhabited interior: allostatic physiology, health-oriented design, and continuous building control. In response, Allostatic Habitat Modulation (AHM; Spanish acronym, MAH) is proposed as an applied, transdisciplinary discipline based on human physiology that integrates habitat design decisions and specifies the operational logic intended to coordinate environmental systems in order to regulate indoor exposure over time. This paper formalises its current state as a conceptual framework and an operational method. The manuscript distinguishes three levels: allostatic load as the disciplinary organising principle; the hypothesis that temporal and multi-domain coordination may reduce the avoidable environmental contribution to allostatic load and overload risk; and an operational objective centred on observable environmental and contextual variables, while any relationship with allostatic load remains subject to experimental evaluation. The method is organised into three layers: habitat design, coordinated active control, and closed-loop biological feedback, the latter explicitly experimental. The unit of decision is the transition between integrated environmental states, subject to an explicit hierarchy of safety, autonomy, exposure prevention, stability, contextual adequacy, comfort, and efficiency. The paper also provides a manufacturer-independent technical specification for the multi-domain substrate: functional categories, documented interfaces, six classes of data, and criteria for distinguishing physically confirmed states from estimated values, using feedback from the equipment itself or independent measurement whenever a decision requires knowledge of the physical state. The central contribution is the formulation of a disciplinary layer capable of translating distributed evidence into coherent, traceable, and falsifiable operation across the life of the habitat. Spanish translation of the same work included as a supporting file (MAH — Modulación Alostática del Hábitat).