Extreme heat can be deadly, particularly to vulnerable people who lack the means to cope with the health risks that come with high temperatures. That’s why a team of University of Arizona researchers started the Heat and Health Resilience Innovation Consortium – to protect those who need it most.

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The consortium combines the expertise of U of A faculty members with external partners to take on the dangers that come along with living in extreme heat.

“Maricopa County has the hottest temperatures and most heat-related deaths in the United States. In Arizona and across the country, we’ve seen a major increase in the number of deaths and heat-related illness,” said Dr. Amelia Gallitano, professor of basic medical sciences at the U of A College of Medicine – Phoenix. 

Gallitano says extreme heat could be potentially catastrophic if coupled with a power outage like the total blackout Portugal and Spain faced in April. According to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, tens of millions of customers lost power for as long as 16 hours. A comparable blackout in a place with extreme heat – like Portugal, Spain and much of Europe faced over the summer – could lead to mass deaths.

“A statewide power outage, like one on the scale that happened recently in Portugal, could result in 71,000 deaths in the state in a matter of days, and more than 50% of the population would need to seek medical treatment,” said Gallitano, who is a member of the BIO5 Institute. “We don’t have the capacity for that, so we need to start making plans and drastically increase mitigation strategies.”

Gallitano is co-leading the Heat and Health Resilience Innovation Consortium with Dr. Freya Spielberg, clinical professor and vice chair for research in the department of family, community and preventive medicine at the College of Medicine – Phoenix. They are bringing together experts from several U of A colleges and partnering with businesses to develop an ecosystem of solutions meant to protect vulnerable Arizonans from heat.

“Our goal is to be facilitators of research for any kind of innovation in this space and to have the kind of networks that we need to partner with to bring the innovations right to where they’re needed most,” Spielberg said. “Heat is now becoming not just a Phoenix problem or even a U.S. problem, it’s a worldwide problem. These are challenges that are going to need to be addressed with new innovations.”

Collaborating for big impact

The consortium is one of six teams funded by the U of A Office of Research and Partnership’s Big Idea Challenge to accelerate transdisciplinary projects with the potential to transform lives, shape policy, drive economic impact and provide training for the next generation of talent. The Big Idea Challenge is meant to turn ideas into reality, and the Heat and Health Resilience Consortium is using the seed funding to enact its strategy to protect vulnerable people from extreme heat.

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“The Big Idea Challenge was designed to empower transdisciplinary teams to confront some of the most complex and daunting challenges we face as a society. In taking on the health threats posed by extreme heat, the Heat and Health Resilience Consortium does exactly that,” said Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, senior vice president for research and partnerships at the U of A. “The partnerships developed by this team of cross-displinary experts are an integral part of finding new solutions to protect people everywhere from the everpresent and growing health risk of extreme heat.”

The consortium seeks to set a statewide example of how best to address the health impacts of extreme heat by joining groups working on various aspects of the problem, including the Southwest Center on Resilience for Climate Change and Health, or SCORCH, and Climate Assessment for the Southwest, or CLIMAS.

“This is such a big problem that you really do need perspectives from a lot of different disciplines to design interventions that, together, will impact heat-related deaths,” Spielberg said. “We have people from architecture that are working on structural interventions. We have people from engineering that are working on wearables. We have people from public health and medicine working on health system changes. The Big Idea Challenge helped to bring all ofthese people together.”

The consortium is focusing on two initial projects: wearable devices and cooling kiosks.

Researchers are developing wearable devices to monitor users’ vital signs and detect signs of heat stroke or other heat-related illnesses. The early concept includes an arm band that connects to an app that will alert the user and medical professionals when signs of heat stroke or illness are detected.

The team plans to use artificial intelligence to conduct an analysis of electronic health record data from Banner Health. The data will be used to establish a Heat Susceptibility Score, which could help identify people who face the biggest risks from extreme heat, such as unhoused people, elderly people with chronic diseases who live alone, people who are on medications that increase their risk and people who work outside for most of the day. These individuals could then be equipped with education, wearable safety devices to detect early signs of heat-related illness and electrolytes to ease the impact of heat.

The consortium’s second project is a system of cooling kiosks that will include shelter from the sun, telemedicine  to allow people to communicate with doctors and nurses, and vending machines to dispense heat prevention items.

“A community health worker could identify an individual who has unmet health care needs that put them at higher risk of heat-related illness and bring them to the kiosk, where they could go through a holistic assessment,” Gallitano said. “Health care workers could determine what care they need. If they need telemedicine or mental health care, they can do that right at the kiosk”

“In 2023 and 2024, about half of the people who died of extreme heat in Arizona were homeless,” Spielberg said. “Often, it’s difficult for people to access care. We end up seeing them in the emergency room, but the goal is to bring to them preventive education and preventive treatments so that they end up not being hospitalized.”

Consortium members will also develop educational materials to inform communities, as well as curriculum to train medical and public health students, about heat-driven medical issues. 

The effort is designed to become self-sustaining. In the first year, the team will identify strategic focus areas, allocate funds to specific projects and apply for additional funding to advance into rapid cycle prototyping. In the second year, the team will work with Tech Launch Arizona to develop commercialization plans for technology like the wearables and cooling kiosks.

“We want to make Arizona the incubator for the testing of health technologies to address the health consequences of extreme heat,” Spielberg said.