The HEAT-SHIELD project - Perspectives from an inter-sectoral approach to occupational heat stress

Objectives: To provide perspectives from the HEAT-SHIELD project (www.heat-shield.eu): a multinational, inter-sectoral, and cross-disciplinary initiative, incorporating twenty European research institutions, as well as occupational health and industrial partners, on solutions to combat negative health and productivity effects caused by working on a warmer world. Methods: In this invited review, we focus on the theoretical and methodological advancements developed to combat occupational heat stress during the last five years of operation. Results: We outline how we created climate forecast models to incorporate humidity, wind and solar radiation to the traditional temperature-based climate projections, providing the basis for timely, policy-relevant, industry-specific and individualized information. Further, we summarise the industry-specific guidelines we developed regarding technical and biophysical cooling solutions considering effectiveness, cost, sustainability, and the practical implementation potential in outdoor and indoor settings, in addition to field-testing of selected solutions with time-motion analyses and biophysical evaluations. All recommendations were adjusted following feedback from workshops with employers, employees, safety officers, and adjacent stakeholders such as local or national health policy makers. The cross-scientific approach was also used for providing policy-relevant information based on socioeconomic analyses and identification of vulnerable regions considered to be more relevant for political actions than average continental recommendations and interventions. Discussion: From the HEAT-SHIELD experiences developed within European settings, we discuss how this inter-sectoral approach may be adopted or translated into actionable knowledge across continents where workers and societies are affected by escalating environmental temperatures.The study has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the grant agreement No 66878

An online platform supporting the analysis of water adaptation measures in the Alps

Climate change may result in reduced water supply from the Alps - an important water resource for Europe. This paper presents a multilingual platform that combines spatial and multi-criteria decision-support tools to facilitate stakeholder collaboration in the analysis of water management adaptation options. The platform has an interactive map interface that allows participants to select a location of their interest within the Alpine Arc. By utilising the decision-support tool, stakeholders can identify suitable adaptation solutions for different geographical units, according to their experience and preference. The platform was used to involve experts across Alpine borders, domains and decision-making levels, as well as a group of university students. The experts favoured the planning instruments for saving water, while the students inclined towards the measures that would improve water conservation. The initial results confirmed the suitability of the platform for future involvement of decision-makers in spatio-temporal analyses of adaptation pathways in the Alps

A neural tracking and motor control approach to improve rehabilitation of upper limb movements

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Restoration of upper limb movements in subjects recovering from stroke is an essential keystone in rehabilitative practices. Rehabilitation of arm movements, in fact, is usually a far more difficult one as compared to that of lower extremities. For these reasons, researchers are developing new methods and technologies so that the rehabilitative process could be more accurate, rapid and easily accepted by the patient. This paper introduces the proof of concept for a new non-invasive FES-assisted rehabilitation system for the upper limb, called smartFES (sFES), where the electrical stimulation is controlled by a biologically inspired neural inverse dynamics model, fed by the kinematic information associated with the execution of a planar goal-oriented movement. More specifically, this work details two steps of the proposed system: an <it>ad hoc </it>markerless motion analysis algorithm for the estimation of kinematics, and a neural controller that drives a synthetic arm. The vision of the entire system is to acquire kinematics from the analysis of video sequences during planar arm movements and to use it together with a neural inverse dynamics model able to provide the patient with the electrical stimulation patterns needed to perform the movement with the assisted limb.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The markerless motion tracking system aims at localizing and monitoring the arm movement by tracking its silhouette. It uses a specifically designed motion estimation method, that we named Neural Snakes, which predicts the arm contour deformation as a first step for a silhouette extraction algorithm. The starting and ending points of the arm movement feed an Artificial Neural Controller, enclosing the muscular Hill's model, which solves the inverse dynamics to obtain the FES patterns needed to move a simulated arm from the starting point to the desired point. Both position error with respect to the requested arm trajectory and comparison between curvature factors have been calculated in order to determine the accuracy of the system.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The proposed method has been tested on real data acquired during the execution of planar goal-oriented arm movements. Main results concern the capability of the system to accurately recreate the movement task by providing a synthetic arm model with the stimulation patterns estimated by the inverse dynamics model. In the simulation of movements with a length of ± 20 cm, the model has shown an unbiased angular error, and a mean (absolute) position error of about 1.5 cm, thus confirming the ability of the system to reliably drive the model to the desired targets. Moreover, the curvature factors of the factual human movements and of the reconstructed ones are similar, thus encouraging future developments of the system in terms of reproducibility of the desired movements.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A novel FES-assisted rehabilitation system for the upper limb is presented and two parts of it have been designed and tested. The system includes a markerless motion estimation algorithm, and a biologically inspired neural controller that drives a biomechanical arm model and provides the stimulation patterns that, in a future development, could be used to drive a smart Functional Electrical Stimulation system (sFES). The system is envisioned to help in the rehabilitation of post stroke hemiparetic patients, by assisting the movement of the paretic upper limb, once trained with a set of movements performed by the therapist or in virtual reality. Future work will include the application and testing of the stimulation patterns in real conditions.</p

The effect of hot days on occupational heat stress in the manufacturing industry: implications for workers' well-being and productivity

Climate change is expected to exacerbate heat stress at the workplace in temperate regions, such as Slovenia. It is therefore of paramount importance to study present and future summer heat conditions and analyze the impact of heat on workers. A set of climate indices based on summer mean (Tmean) and maximum (Tmax) air temperatures, such as the number of hot days (HD: Tmax above 30 °C), and Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) were used to account for heat conditions in Slovenia at six locations in the period 1981–2010. Observed trends (1961–2011) of Tmean and Tmax in July were positive, being larger in the eastern part of the country. Climate change projections showed an increase up to 4.5 °C for mean temperature and 35 days for HD by the end of the twenty-first century under the high emission scenario. The increase in WBGT was smaller, although sufficiently high to increase the frequency of days with a high risk of heat stress up to an average of a third of the summer days. A case study performed at a Slovenian automobile parts manufacturing plant revealed non-optimal working conditions during summer 2016 (WBGT mainly between 20 and 25 °C). A survey conducted on 400 workers revealed that 96% perceived the temperature conditions as unsuitable, and 56% experienced headaches and fatigue. Given these conditions and climate change projections, the escalating problem of heat is worrisome. The European Commission initiated a program of research within the Horizon 2020 program to develop a heat warning system for European workers and employers, which will incorporate case-specific solutions to mitigate heat stress.The work was supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action (Project number 668786: HEATSHIELD)

The Italian Draft Law on the \u2018Provisions Concerning the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage\u2019

Intangible cultural heritage in Italy is still in need of a unified approach, capable of providing reliable criteria for identifying its assets and for indicating timescales and means by which they should be safeguarded. In the continued absence of up-to-date, ad hoc state legislation (since the content of those laws which do implement international Conventions is too generic in nature to be sufficiently effective), the Regions have proceeded to act in a somewhat scattered manner, giving rise to an extremely fragmented and very disorderly regulatory framework. The draft law N. 4486, "Provisions Concerning the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage", presented on 12th May 2017 at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic - as the result of the work of an interdisciplinary and inter-university research team coordinated by Marco Giampieretti, who has drafted the final text with the collaboration of Simona Pinton - seeks to fill the serious void that exists in Italian legal system by aligning it to the principles of international and European law, by redirecting the relevant State and Regional legislation, and by satisfying the fundamental requirements of the national community