Growing up as the daughter of immigrants from El Salvador, Roxana Chicas heard horror stories about what the heat could do to construction workers like her stepfather.
Stories of a worker who got dizzy and fell off a roof, a farmworker who fainted in the field and was run over by a tractor trailer, and the daily challenges of working outdoors under a “blazing sun” inspired Chicas to devote her career to researching the impacts of heat on the body.
“I remember those stories and carry them with me in everything that I do now,” said Chicas, an assistant professor of nursing at Emory University in Atlanta. She and a team of researchers from Georgia Tech have developed a new device to help outdoor workers monitor how heat is affecting their bodies and collect data to better understand the effects.
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