Satesh M. Mahadeo, Artur Zych, Diar Sanakov
Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) patients often lose the ability to sense and control their body temperature, making them very susceptible to temperature-related illnesses, such as heat stroke. To solve this problem, we designed a cooling vest to cool water with a Peltier cooler and circulate it through a network of tubes around the vest by inducing flow with a centrifugal pump. An Arduino-based feedback control system senses the wearer’s core body temperature in order to determine when cooling is required to self-regulate the cooling system. The finished prototype had a maximum cooling power of 120 watts and it successfully turned itself on/off when temperatures got above/within core body temperature range (37±0.5C).