The five-year partnership, beginning September 2020, will enable the development of next-generation heat protection solutions and technologies.
The use of wearable technology has been popularized for monitoring physical activity in the general population and has also increasingly been used for identifying disease states, tracking rehabilitation, and optimizing performance. However, there are no existing systems for the management and monitoring of heat strain in the public, in workers, athletes, military personnel, and other groups. Innovative systems will consider a multitude of factors that affect a person’s physiological capacity to dissipate heat such as age, sex, chronic disease and race as well as factors within a person’s control that are modifiable over short periods of time, such as hydration, fitness and acclimation and furthermore those beyond a person’s control such as heat exposure duration.
This partnership will synergize Dr. Kenny’s wealth of expertise and data on physiological response to heat stress with SmartCone’s sensor technologies to address this critical gap by developing and commercializing state-of-the-art heat protection solutions such as heat stress management platforms and wearable biosensors to track individuals heat strain.
Dr. Kenny’s laboratory, HEPRU, is the largest facility in Canada, uniquely dedicated to the assessment of the human heat stress response and the only research unit with a whole-body air calorimeter that provides the gold standard method to measure the heat dissipated by the human body. This unique research facility, which also houses three large environmental chambers, will serve as an important vehicle to facilitate the testing of monitoring technologies developed by SmartCone. These technologies will integrate HEPRU’s unique, high-resolution foundational data on the human heat stress response into technologies for the management and monitoring of heat strain that are ecologically valid and tailored to specific population groups to mitigate the effects of heat stress on the general public and workers.
To learn more about the HEPRU lab please visit their website: https://hepru.ca/
SmartCone Technologies is a Canadian based firm in the digital technology and sensor-based industry in Ottawa. They have been researching and developing IoT (Internet of Things) technologies to make safety more intelligent, cost effective, adaptable, scalable, and mobile since 2011. All, at the highest standards of security and privacy.
To learn more about SmartCone Technologies please visit their website: https://www.thesmartcone.com/