COOLVID research started: sports innovations deployed in the fight against corona

5 May 2020

Treating corona patients in the Intensive Care is a top-class sport. Wearing protective clothing causes the temperature of the care workers to rise considerably during work. To keep them cool, cooling vests are used that were developed in the project 'Thermo Tokyo'. These cooling vests were originally intended for top athletes who have to perform at the Olympic Games in hot Tokyo. In order to use the knowledge gained within the Thermo Tokyo project in the health care sector, ZonMw is granting an additional impulse of 50,000 euros.

Within the project, various cooling strategies have been evaluated in order to reduce heat stress before, during and after sports as much as possible. This shows that applying (the right) cooling strategies can improve performance.
Important results for the medical staff dealing with heat stress. The ICU staff who help corona patients work long shifts in protective clothing with a higher body temperature as a result. The cooling vests, one of the cooling methods developed, are now being used so that ICU staff can lose heat and catch their breath for a while.

What is the extra budget used for?

The extra budget will be used to deploy the developed cooling strategies in healthcare. As soon as possible cooling materials will be spread over various hospitals. Think for example of ice jackets, cooling vests and slush machines. The effectiveness of these will then be evaluated. Subsequently, the cooling interventions can be used in other regular care processes.

What is Thermo Tokyo?

The project 'Thermo Tokyo: beat the heat' is a collaboration between the Radboudumc, the University of Arnhem and Nijmegen, VU University Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology and NOC*NSF. Within Thermo Tokyo we investigated how performance loss can be reduced in a warm and humid environment (such as during the Olympic Games in Tokyo). In addition, it has been investigated how top athletes can perform as well as possible in a safe way. The researchers drew up a personal heat profile of each athlete, making it possible to apply personalised cooling strategies.
Thijs Eijsvogels of the Radboudumc coordinates the research, which was funded by ZonMw.