The world’s first “indoor-outdoor breathing, sweating and walking thermal” manikin has been created – and its name is ANDI.
The manikin has 35 different surface areas and has been designed to mimic the “thermal functions of the human body”.
Each of the surface areas is individually controlled with temperature sensors, heat flux sensors and pores that bead sweat, according to the Arizona State University (ASU) team behind ANDI.
So why build a manikin that can sweat? Konrad Rykaczewski, associate professor at the University’s School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, hopes to use ANDI to measure the effects of extreme heat on human health.
He said: “ANDI sweats; he generates heat, shivers, walks and breathes. “There’s a lot of great work out there for extreme heat, but there’s also a lot missing. We’re trying to develop a very good understanding (of how heat impacts the human body) so we can quantitatively design things to address it.”
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Researchers hope to better understand heat stress on the human body and what makes hot weather so deadly.
Inside ASU’s newly developed heat chamber – dubbed the Warm Room – the researchers can simulate heat-exposure scenarios from different areas of Earth.
It is outfitted with technology to control temperatures of up to 60C (140 degrees Fahrenheit), control the wind and solar radiation.
ANDI isn’t confined to the Warm Room, however. It is the only thermal manikin on the planet that can be used outside.
It is built with internal cooling channels that allow it to stay cool enough to withstand extreme heat while “measuring complex variables that contribute to our perception of heat in different environments”.
Jenni Vanos, associate professor in the ASU School of Sustainability, said: “You can’t put humans in dangerous extreme heat situations and test what would happen.
“But there are situations we know of in the Valley where people are dying of heat and we still don’t fully understand what happened. ANDI can help us figure that out.”
Ankit Joshi, an ASU research scientist and the lead operator of ANDI said: “We can move different BMI [body mass index] models, different age characteristics and different medical conditions (into ANDI).
“A diabetes patient has different thermal regulation from a healthy person. So we can account for all this modification with our customised models.”
The team hope to use their findings to develop new technology to help tackle the impact of heat.
These could include cooling clothes or exoskeletons for backpacks that are designed for cooling support.
