Severe stress endangers outdoor workers who are in an exceedingly hot workplace. Although recent studies quantify stress levels on the human skin, they still rely on rigid, bulky sensor modules, causing data loss from motion artifacts and limited field‐deployability for continuous health monitoring. Moreover, no prior work shows a wearable device that can endure heat exposure while showing continuous monitoring of a subject's stress under realistic working environments. Herein, a soft, field‐deployable, wearable bioelectronic system is introduced for detecting outdoor workers' stress levels with negligible motion artifacts and controllable thermal management. A nanofabric radiative cooler (NFRC) and miniaturized sensors with a nanomembrane soft electronic platform are integrated to measure stable electrodermal activities and temperature in hot outdoor conditions. The NFRC exhibits outstanding cooling performance in sub‐ambient air with high solar reflectivity and high thermal emissivity. The integrated wearable device with all embedded electronic components and the NFRC shows a lower temperature (41.1%) in sub‐ambient air than the NFRC‐less device while capturing improved operation time (18.2%). In vivo human study of the bioelectronics with agricultural activities demonstrates the device's capability for portable, continuous, real‐time health monitoring of outdoor workers with field deployability.
Hotter summers caused by global warming and increased workload and duration are endangering the health of farmworkers, a high‐risk population for heat‐related illness (HRI), and deaths. Although prior studies using wearable sensors show the feasibility of employing field‐collected data for HRI monitoring, existing devices still have limitations, such as data loss from motion artifacts, device discomfort from rigid electronics, difficulties with administering ingestible sensors, and low temporal resolution. Here, this paper introduces a wireless, wearable bioelectronic system with functionalities for continuous monitoring of skin temperature, electrocardiograms (ECG), heart rates (HR), and activities, configured in a single integrated package. Advanced nanomanufacturing based on laser machining allows rapid device fabrication and direct incorporation of sensors with a highly breathable substrate, allowing for managing excessive sweating and multimodal stresses. To validate the device's performance in agricultural settings, the device is applied to multiple farmworkers at various operations, including fernery, nursery, and crop. The accurate data recording, including high‐fidelity ECG (signal‐to‐noise ratio: >20 dB), accurate HR (
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10368744
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advanced Healthcare Materials
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 13
- ISSN:
- 2192-2640
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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