Can Wearable Tech Help Builders Impacted by Record Heat?

It’s always hot in Texas in the summer, but 2023 is turning into a year of record heat waves, creating enormous concerns for workers, especially in the construction business, who need to do their jobs outside when the temperature is consistently in triple digits.

One Dallas-based contractor is trying to address these concerns with new wearable technology that NASA and Boeing are developing for future space missions. Rogers-O’Brien Construction is outfitting its workers at a job site at Southern Methodist University with an armband with sensors that monitor heart rate, body temperature, and other biometrics. If the sensor registers an above-average reading it sounds an alarm to the worker that is then relayed back to a safety supervisor.

The system, called SafeGuard, is from Fairborn, OH-based Sentinel Occupational Safety, which bills itself as a “Safety-as-a-Service company that provides solutions for industrial and personal health monitoring.”

Dallas typically averages about 20 days a year with temperatures over 100 degrees but last year there were 47 such days and with record heat waves across the entire country this summer that record could fall before things start to cool down in the fall.

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