Cath Rogan, director of Smart Garment People, talks to Gwyn Winfield about being dangerously hot
Hot, sweaty mess I
t’s hard to underestimate the impact of heat exhaustion in CBRN. The closest analogue would be firefighters, who have to do a difficult task wearing personal protective equipment (PPE), and overexertion remains their leading cause of death while exposure to fumes is only on a par with alcohol overdoses1
. This suggests
that should any CBRN attack happen, affecting well protected individuals, deaths due to complications from heat stress would beat agent exposure by at least an order of magnitude. Another close relationship between firefighters and CBRN responders is the lip service paid to the problem. There is a macho need to overcome ‘simply being hot’ and get on with the job. It is a difficult balance to strike.
Mission objectives need to be met, and if they can’t because Trooper Winfield feels a bit sweaty, then the mission starts to come second, a generally poor state of affairs. One solution to this problem is to provide cooling methods. These can include ice vests, phase change material (generally a saline solution that cools slower than its environment), or active cooling through blowing air inside a suit or pipes circulating cool water. These provide variable results; ice vests tend to be uncomfortable and short lived, phase change works until the solution reaches ambient temperature, and active solutions tend to be power hungry. The alternative is a monitoring system that provides live feed on physiological symptoms back to a commander who can tell the individual when they are approaching dangerous levels of heat strain, should they be unaware. Yet this tolerance to heat stress is a
very individual reaction. What is too much for Trooper Winfield might seem entirely tolerable to Trooper Bigongiari. The sweet spot in both the solutions above would be a system that provides cooling that is calibrated to the individual’s requirements and which can
anticipate when cooling is needed, so that it can be activated and retarded automatically. While this might seem a little like science fiction [or a ginger necessity. Ed.] Cath Rogan felt that it is not too far away… “It’s not there yet, but could be
around three to four years away. Maybe not a version that also plays your favourite music, but there is demand
from the user community for cooling and monitoring systems to be more joined up and offer broader capabilities than they currently do. There are the remote physiological monitoring systems (RPMs) that have been around for a while, but they still don’t measure your core temperature. And cooling systems are entirely separate. The monitoring systems that are out there
Can monitoring and cooling work hand in hand to provide a more effective response ©CBRNe World
CBRNe Convergence, Orlando, USA, 6-8 November 2018
www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2018 54 CBRNe WORLD February 2018
www.cbrneworld.com
CBRNeWORLD
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