UGA professors research accuracy of heat monitoring smartphone application

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12-05-2025

A key component of heat safety in an effort to avoid heat illnesses involves monitoring environmental conditions through heat stress.
A recently published study out of the University of Georgia identified a smartphone application designed to monitor heat-related risks through direct on-site measurements.
'A lot of my work and the people I work with, we interact a lot with people in athletic training and other settings where they have to monitor conditions for safety,' said Andrew Grundstein, professor in the Department of Geography, at the University of Georgia. 'Athletic trainers are coming to us saying, 'There's this new app. How well does it work?'
Grundstein added, 'We didn't know. There isn't a lot of information on the website that could tell us how accurate it was. So that's how we constructed our study, to at least have a comparison with the gold standard of taking measurements on site."
The study, Evaluating Heat Risk: Comparing On-Site WBGT Measurements Versus Smartphone Application Estimates, highlighted that the key component of heat safety involves monitoring environmental conditions through heat stress indices like the wet bulb globe temperature and adjusting activity as conditions get progressively hotter.
'We got athletic trainers from 26 different schools in 11 states to collect data for two months,' said Grundstein. 'The data was collected during the hottest time of the year, August and September. That's important, because that's when a lot of fall sports began, especially football. Football players are really susceptible to heat. The information is used to guide safety decisions for players on the field. They also collected data with the app.'
The study compared the phone application-derived Zelus wet bulb globe temperature estimates with on-site measurements from Kestrel 5400 devices and their impact on activity modification categorization.
Traditionally, on-site wet bulb globe temperature measurement devices are used, according to the study. But phone applications offering wet bulb globe temperature estimates have emerged as a potential alternative. However, there is little information on how closely phone application-derived wet bulb globe temperature matches on-site measurements to guide decision-making.
'So we had a data set of their observations collected on site, right over grass, artificial turf or other surfaces,' said Grundstein. 'Using that data, we were able to analyze how the application did compared to the on site data. We used that information to write our paper.'
Grundstein added, 'If you look across the U.S., heat is the leading weather killer. It kills more people than tornadoes, hurricanes and floods, which I think surprises a lot of people. Athletes are really susceptible to heat. It's one of the top three leading causes of sudden death in sports. It can also lead to all sorts of heat-related problems, short of dying.'
More than 700 people die from extreme heat every year in the United States, according to experts with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Aside from athletes older adults, young children, and people with chronic medical conditions are at high risk for heat-related illness and death.
'Heat causes a lot of serious problems in athletes, the general population and in our working population,' he said. 'One of the best ways to protect people is to collect information on how hot it is outside and adjust what people are doing. So if it's really hot, you might want to give them more rest breaks, shorten the practice or make the practice less intense.'
'We know that when you put safety measures in place it substantially reduces the number of people that have heat-related problems,' said Grundstein. 'There's all sorts of new technology that's coming out to collect health data, to monitor weather conditions and so forth. I think people just want to know how well these tools work. This particular product we assessed and people want to know does this work well. That's what led to our study. What we found was that the app tended to underestimate the heat stress.'
This reporting content is supported by a partnership with several funders and Journalism Funding Partners.
Erica Van Buren is the climate change reporter for The Augusta Chronicle, part of the USA TODAY Network. Connect with her at [e-mail] or on X: @EricaVanBuren32.
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: UGA study looks at environment monitoring smartphone application