Temperature monitoring system for the assessment of thermal comfort in sports and work clothes

The determination of body temperature in humans is an essential feature that must be maintained within a certain range, called neutrality, to maintain human thermal well-being. Human is a homoeothermic species, which means that it maintains its body temperature in a certain range of values, for example, the oral cavity must remain between 36.5 and 37.5 degrees centigrade. However, if the external conditions are not favorable, adaptive thermogenesis may be necessary, by applying specific physiological methods, it heats or cools the body to maintain its temperature within a certain range, beyond which it could face frostbite, coma or death. Most studies on human thermal well-being deal with two main themes: the first concerns the development and production of sports clothing, while the second concerns the development and production of work clothing. Sports clothing should not just allow adequate heat dissipation in the case of physical activity in a warm environment, but it should also thermally insulate the subject in the case of physical activity in a cold environment; these two goals should be achieved without limiting the athlete's movements. Work clothing is more critical because individuals can be subjected to extreme temperatures; they should protect the human body from chemical and biological agents and radiation, they should dissipate the sweat produced by the body and they should dissipate the heat-related to temperatures to which they can be subjected. It is, therefore, necessary to develop a device that allows controlling human temperature, even for prolonged times, by using multiple temperature sensors to better understand the dynamics of heat distribution in different parts of the body. Data obtained should be saved and analyzed to create smart sports clothing which integrates these monitoring devices and can adapt the subject's thermal conditions to the optimal conditions for a given activity. The purpose of this thesis is to create a device with thermistors that can be placed on the subject to acquire temperature data. Collected data are sent via radio to another receiving device connected via USB to the computer so that they can be read by a created graphic interface and saved in text files. The transmitter device also has a rechargeable battery and a display that shows the measured temperatures. Furthermore, it shows the battery level and the correct data reception to the receiving device; therefore, the subject can realize whether is too far from the receiving device. The first button has been programmed to change the display visualization mode, and the second button to change the filtering system. The code used to program the transmission/receiving system was written in C++, instead, the code related to the graphic interface was written in python; in details, the latter has several useful features, including gathering new data, adding data, uploading data to visualize them, deleting data, visualizing just specific channels, monitoring battery voltage or changing data samples gathering time.