EcoCool: A wearable to prevent heat stress

Every day, 2.4 billion people go to work under the open sky – farmers tending fields, construction workers building cities, soldiers on patrol. Their roles are essential, physically demanding, and inelastic: They cannot move indoors, turn on a fan, or wait out the heat. For these vulnerable populations, extreme heat can be deadly. In 2024 alone, extreme heat was responsible for nearly 500,000 deaths globally. This burden is expected to intensify as rising global temperatures make extreme heat events more frequent and severe.

To address this urgent issue, personal cooling solutions are promising because they can adapt to and move with individual workers, making them uniquely scalable across the diverse and dispersed environments where outdoor labor happens. However, most personal cooling products on the market either fail to demonstrate a meaningful impact on heat stress or remain impractical for large-scale deployment.

This project aims to address this gap by developing and implementing a wearable personal cooling solution that can prevent heat illness and meet the demands of real work environments. By working with biologists, design experts, and stakeholders in agriculture and construction, we aim to build a solution that is centered on medical rigor and real-world usability. This work has the potential to establish an evidence-based standard for heat protection and to reduce heat-related mortality worldwide.