Examining the physiological strain with electric fans during high indoor heat stress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fans have been positioned as a low-cost, sustainable, and accessible heat resilience solution during extreme heat. Many health agencies caution against fan use when air temperature exceeds skin temperature (e.g. ≥35°C) suggesting they will accelerate body heating compared to still air. However, the increased evaporative efficiency with a fan likely mitigates greater rises in core temperature and cardiovascular strain compared to still air when the air temperature is >35°C. The present study evaluated the physiological responses with and without fans when indoor air temperature exceeded skin temperature to elucidate the safe upper limit. In a randomized crossover design, 10 healthy adults (4 females, 24±4 y, 1.8±0.1 m, 75.8±10.1 kg) were exposed to a simulated indoor overheating scenario whereby air temperature increased linearly from 38°C to 47°C over 3 hours, with a fan (∼5.5 m/s) or still air (<0.2 m/s). Heart rate and core temperature were significantly greater with a fan compared to still air when air temperature was ≥44°C and ≥45°C, respectively. Mean skin temperature and skin blood flow were statistically higher with a fan. While a fan increased whole-body sweat rate, the additional sweating can be counterbalanced with increased fluid intake (∼250 mL/h at 43°C) to mitigate dehydration. In conclusion, fans result in a higher heart rate or core temperature compared to still air in healthy adults when indoor air temperature >43°C; ∼3-11°C greater than guidance from various health agencies globally. Future work in other age groups and heat-vulnerable populations is needed, including field-based evaluation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".