No abstract

Global warming has been affecting human health, including direct mortality and morbidity from extreme heat, storms, drought, and indirect infectious diseases. It is not only “global” but extremely “personal”—it is a matter of life and death for many of us. In this perspective, we propose the use of wearable technologies for localized personal thermoregulation as an innovative method to reduce the impact on health and enable wider adaptability to extreme thermal environments. The state‐of‐the‐art thermoregulation methods and wearable sensing technologies are summarized. In addition, the feasibility of thermoregulation technology in preventive medicine for promoting health under climate change is comprehensively discussed. Further, we provide an outlook on health‐oriented closed loop that can be achieved based on parallel thermoregulation and multiple data inputs from the physiological, environmental, and psychological cues, which could promote individuals and the public to better adapt to global warming.image

The deep space's coldness (∼4 K) provides a ubiquitous and inexhaustible thermodynamic resource to suppress the cooling energy consumption. However, it is nontrivial to achieve subambient radiative cooling during daytime under strong direct sunlight, which requires rational and delicate photonic design for simultaneous high solar reflectivity (>94%) and thermal emissivity. A great challenge arises when trying to meet such strict photonic microstructure requirements while maintaining manufacturing scalability. Herein, we demonstrate a rapid, low-cost, template-free roll-to-roll method to fabricate spike microstructured photonic nanocomposite coatings with Al 2 O 3 and TiO 2 nanoparticles embedded that possess 96.0% of solar reflectivity and 97.0% of thermal emissivity. When facing direct sunlight in the spring of Chicago (average 699 W/m 2 solar intensity), the coatings show a radiative cooling power of 39.1 W/m 2 . Combined with the coatings' superhydrophobic and contamination resistance merits, the potential 14.4% cooling energy-saving capability is numerically demonstrated across the United States.

Global warming has been affecting human health, including direct mortality and morbidity from extreme heat, storms, drought and indirect infectious diseases. It is not only “global” but extremely “personal” – it is a matter of life and death for many of us. In this perspective, we propose the use of wearable technologies for localized personal thermoregulation as an innovative method to reduce the impact on health and enable wider adaptability to extreme thermal environments. The start-to-art thermoregulation methods and wearable sensing technology are summarized. In addition, the feasibility of thermoregulation technology in preventive medicine for promoting health under climate change is comprehensively discussed. Further, we provided an outlook on health-oriented closed loop that can be achieved based on parallel thermoregulation and multiple data inputs from the physiological, environmental, and psychological cues, which could promote individuals and the public to better adapt to global warming.