Personal Cooling Garments to Protect at-Risk Patients from Extreme Heat Waves

Personal Cooling Garments to Protect at-Risk Patients from Extreme Heat Waves Project Summary/Abstract Global warming is resulting in more intense, more frequent, and longer periods of extreme heat events, which have caused numerous diseases and, in some cases, fatalities. Heat stress could especially impact patients with heart, lung, and blood diseases. Patients suffering from heart disease, poor blood circulation, high blood pressure, obesity, as well as the elderly have a higher risk for heat-related illness due to low sensitivity in temperature changes and weak self-regulation capability. A lightweight personal cooling garment could be a game-changing solution to protect at-risk patients with cardiovascular, lung, blood, and other diseases during extreme heat events. However, today’s personal cooling garments are not adequate as they are often too bulky and heavy, have limited cooling duration, and have no or limited temperature controllability. There is a strong need for a personal cooling garment with effective cooling, adjustable temperature, lightweight, is flexible & wearable, consumes less power (high coefficient of performance), and has low cost. The project aims to develop and test prototypes of personal active cooling garments to protect at-risk patients from heat waves. The project will leverage the core intellectual property developed at UCSD on flexible thermoelectric devices (f-TEDs). GE&R LLC and UCSD will establish a high-throughput manufacturing process to scale up the fabrication of flexible f-TEGs specifically designed for personal cooling, integrate them into garments with temperature-control electronics and power supply, and test the garments using lab benchtop experiments. We will participate in the NSF I-Corps program at UCSD to interview potential users and conduct a market survey for further development towards commercialization.