An IoT-aware smart system to detect thermal comfort in industrial environments

There are many industrial environments that expose workers to perform arduous work in high heat-stress conditions, which can lead to rapid increases in body temperature that elevate the risk of heat-related illness and even death. A recent very important challenge is focused on systems able to mitigate work-related heat injury trying to evaluate physiological strain responses of the workers by measuring in continuous some parameters such as heart rate and skin temperatures in several points of the body. Recent advancements in wearable devices and more in general in Internet of Things enabling technologies have been made to monitor one or more physiological indices of heat strain by using low cost and low power devices with the opportunity, often, to correlate them with environment conditions regulated through other smart things such as HVAC systems. This paper proposes a smart system able to monitor in continuous and in unobtrusive way skin temperature and heart rate and to detect real-time heat-stress conditions for workers. The proposed solution is based on scalable and high performance RESTful and Cloud-based software architecture. Main components of the system are described clearly showing the interaction among them and the used communication protocols. Some first feasibility experiments have been carried out in a controlled test environment such as a laboratory whose initial and partial results are included here. Finally, a proof-of-concept is reported in order to describe main functionalities and interactions of the proposed system.