Heat Exhaustion

A soldier is exposed to a number of risks during training and active deployment that may be life threatening. Heat illness, occurring in training or during exercise in hot environments, is one of those risks with adverse events and multiple deaths reported among US and UK soldiers during combat or training exercises. This project seeks to capture the cardiovascular responses during heat or cold stressors in combination with exercise through well-controlled non-invasive measurements in an environmental chamber, whilst using a computational and machine learning approach to:
- Gain a better mechanistic understanding of the cardiovascular changes during heat exertion.
- Help develop smart wearables for continuous monitoring of cardiovascular signals that can aid prediction, planning and decision making.

This work is funded by DASA with Jason Carson, Alex Drysdale and Henry Parry covering the modelling, machine learning and experimental parts.