Heat Stress Adviser: A Program For Palm-Type PDA's And For Microsoft Windows
Environmental heat stress can adversely affect athletic performance and lead to injury or death. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) guidelines designed to avoid these undesirable outcomes are expressed as Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT), a very powerful heat stress index developed by the US Marine Corps at their Parris Island, South Carolina, training center. Devices for measuring WBGT tend to be fragile and very expensive, and this deters guidelines adherence.
Handy, inexpensive devices can provide playing field temperature and humidity information, but converting these readings into WBGT requires application of complex modeling techniques. To overcome this difficulty, the Zunis Foundation has commissioned development of a program for Palm-type PDA's and for Microsoft Windows. This program, Heat Stress Adviser, allows WBGT to be estimated from data obtained from a digital psychrometer, a sling psychrometer or a local airport. Once the estimated WBGT is calculated, the user is automatically taken to a guidelines page that outlines sport-specific recommendations for current weather conditions.
Please note: Fluid recommendations made for US football are based on the assumption that players are the size of adult males. Fluid intake must be carefully balanced against fluid losses to avoid both dehydration (which is very common) and over-hydration and hyponatremia (which are uncommon, but can be serious).
In addition to providing estimated WBGT and guidelines recommendations, Heat Stress Adviser contains a wealth of information related to heat stress in sports. Heat Stress Adviser is freeware, available without charge but not to be sold or re-sold.
Event Safety Calculator is a program based on a Sports Medicine Australia (SA Branch) checklist for planning sports events. Event Safety Calculator is a module included in Heat Stress Adviser °F and in Heat Stress Adviser °C. It can also be downloaded as a free-standing program.
To begin the download process for Heat Stress Adviser, click on one of these links:
Download Heat Stress Adviser °F for Palm-Type PDA
Download Heat Stress Adviser °C for Palm-Type PDA
Download Heat Stress Adviser °F for Microsoft Windows
Download Heat Stress Adviser °C for Microsoft Windows
Download Event Safety Calculator °F for Microsoft Windows
Download Event Safety Calculator °C for Microsoft Windows
After the download is complete, unzip the file proceed with installation. If you have questions or comments, please contact the Zunis Webmaster through the link at the bottom of this page.
If you are trying to download the Macintosh version of Heat Stress Adviser, click here.
If you are trying to download the Pocket PC/Windows Mobile PDA version of Heat Stress Adviser, you will need to use a work-around solution. Since Heat Stress Adviser has not yet been ported to the Pocket PC platform, it is necessary to install a Palm OS emulator program on your Pocket PC PDA to act as a translator. An excellent program for this function is Style Tap, available from http://styletap.com/ . After installing Style Tap on your Pocket PC PDA, just install Heat Stress Adviser for Palm as you ordinarily would. Heat Stress Adviser runs perfectly in this setting, and the presence of Style Tap allows the Pocket PC user to have access to the more than 20,000 Palm PDA applications, many of them free. (The author has found Style Tap to be a terrific program, as used with the Dell Axim PDA and Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.)