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Abstract

Several metrics for assessing human thermal response have been proposed in the literature, with skin temperature (TSkin) and skin relative humidity (RHSkin) being among them. These metrics aim to describe human thermal perception of their thermal environment. Traditional parameter analysis involves multiple expensive, complex, invasive devices that require unnatural adjustments to the user, may result in poor signal quality, and provide unreliable feedback on thermal status. We tested a wearable system containing TSkin and RHSkin sensors that can perform thermoregulatory evaluation that will circumvent the limitations of the traditional thermal analysis systems. 19 healthy adults completed validation testing in a high intensity exercise protocol with our wearable sensor system. Band sensors were validated against two types of iButtons (Hygrochrons for relative humidity, Thermochrons for temperature). The comparisons were done between the Bands and three different averaged locations of iButtons: abdomen, torso, and whole body. Pearson’s correlation and Bland Altman Analysis were used to compare the Bands to the Hygrochrons. Except for the abdomen location, the RH’s calculated by our wearable sensor system showed high to very high correlation with the Hygrochrons (r = 0.862 to 0.967) but due to the large error cannot be used as a reference. For TSkin, a t-test found that the only non-significant differences were between the Bands and the whole-body averages of Thermochrons. One-Way ANOVA testing found that the location of Hygrochrons and Bands led to significantly differences in RH measurements (p