Smart cooling glove helps athletes overcome fatigue

FIFA World cup football players know how difficult it is to play in the noon-day German sun-in some cases over 30 degree temperature. Equitorial country teams who are used to the heat, have had the "heat factor" advantage over their more northerly or more southern neigbors. (Uraine lost 4  to 0 to Spain in its first World Cup game)

Athletes, and patients, know that overheating hurts a body’s performance. Even worse, if sweating shuts down, one can get heat stroke, leading to sudden death.

In the near future, elite foot-ballers (and other athletes and patients at risk of overheating, such as MS ) may have  a smart cooling glove ( called RTX for rapid thermal exchange, Core Control or simply The Glove ) to offer quick cooling and relieve from heat and fatigue. The devise, developed by two Stanford biologists- H. Craig Heller and Dennis Grahn, draws heat away from your palm, in a vacuum chamber, sending cooler blood back into the body .(see diagram below that illustrates how it works)

Heller and Grahn have received a series of patents through Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, which will share in any royalties. They are founders and major stakeholders in AVAcore Technologies, a Michigan firm charged with making the RTX commercially viable. (The company moved from the Bay Area to Ann Arbor in 2003 to take advantage of engineers laid off from the automotive industry.)

“It’s hard to build a compressor small enough to be useful in portable situations,” says Ronald Piasecki, chief executive officer of AVAcore. “Eventually nanotech may play a role in accomplishing our engineering goals.”

Piasecki has overseen improvements to the RTX manufacturing process, reducing the cost and time to build each Core Control machine.

“Clearly, the athletic market is the low-hanging fruit,” he says of the 100 units sold so far. “But this fall we’re starting a study of MS patients in conjunction with the University of Michigan neurology department.”

Heller remains confident that the technology can be brought to wide markets. Engineers are trying to design a smaller one-size-fits-all glove version.

“There are many applications of both heating and cooling,” he says. “Firefighters, soldiers in full gear in the Iraq desert, stroke victims [where cooling patients can prevent further damage], cancer patients [where heating can increase effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs], cystic fibrosis, heatstroke victims”—all are potential beneficiaries of RTX

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Walter Derzko

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Comments

[Chris]

The problem with putting your hand in ice or water is that it constricts the blood vessels to prevent heat loss. This makes your body cool down slower. The vaccuum draws the heat to the surface instead.

[Bob Stanton]

During the Midwest summers, we used to fill a sink with cold water and immerse our hands in it for about 5 min. It worked, up to a point. But I gather that the vacuum in the Glove also helps.

[levendus]

Can't you get the same results by just dunking your hand into a bucket, or big gulp, of ice water?