Passive cooling vest addresses heat stress for outdoor workers worldwide

A graduate's design tackles a real occupational health crisis affecting 2.4 billion workers without requiring batteries or active electronics. The passive engineering approach sidesteps both the maintenance burden and cost barriers of powered cooling devices, potentially creating a scalable intervention for heat-related illness in agriculture, construction, and logistics sectors that have largely lacked accessible protective technology. Heat stress is already reducing worker productivity and causing preventable deaths in developing economies that can't absorb the cost or complexity of high-tech alternatives.