Analyzing environmental heat stress under changing work conditions: A sensor‐based monitoring solution

Hot stressful work conditions impose subsequent suppressions on workers' wellbeing resulting in heat‐related morbidities, reduced productivity, and economic burden. Heat stress evaluations require costly monitoring tools that may be uneconomical while monitoring multiple locations simultaneously under the targeted workplace, especially in industrially developing countries. With recent technological advancements, sensor‐based intelligence could enable environmental heat stress monitoring at a substantially lesser price than costlier monitoring tools. In the present study, a sensor‐based approach has been utilized to develop a low‐cost data acquisition system involving widely used temperature‐humidity (THu) based indices and environmental sensors for monitoring heat stress parameters under three different work environments (i.e., indoor, outdoor, foundry). Notable variations were observed among respective work environments for the evaluated heat stress parameters. Higher heat exposures were attributable to the foundry and outdoor conditions than indoor. Based on the bivariate correlation analysis, strong associations were observed among respective indices (p