Elsevier

Journal of Thermal Biology

Volume 29, Issues 7–8, October–December 2004, Pages 549-558
Journal of Thermal Biology

Skin and core temperature response to partial- and whole-body heating and cooling

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtherbio.2004.08.024Get rights and content

Abstract

1. Human subjects were exposed to partial- and whole-body heating and cooling in a controlled environmental chamber to quantify physiological and subjective responses to thermal asymmetries and transients.

2. Skin temperatures, core temperature, thermal sensation, and comfort responses were collected for 19 local body parts and for the whole body.

3. Core temperature increased in response to skin cooling and decreased in response to skin heating.

4. Hand and finger temperatures fluctuated significantly when the body was near a neutral thermal state.

5. When using a computer mouse in a cool environment, the skin temperature of the hand using the mouse was observed to be 2–3 °C lower than the unencumbered hand.

Section snippets

Background

Most humans subjected to thermal comfort studies (e.g., Nevins et al., 1966; McNall et al., 1967; Fanger, 1972; Rohles and Wallis, 1979; de Dear et al., 1993) have related subjective perceptions to environmental conditions, but not to skin and core temperatures. A few fundamental sensation and pleasantness studies have included such measurements (Frank et al., 1999; Cabanac, 1969; Attia and Engel, 1981; Mower, 1976; Hensel, 1982), but their test conditions do not apply to realistic everyday

Experiment procedure

We performed 109 human subject tests in a controlled environmental chamber at the University of California, Berkeley. The following categories of tests are reported here.

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    Uniform/stable. These tests established the physiological temperatures corresponding to neutral, warm, and cold sensations. The chamber was controlled to specific temperatures from 20 to 32 °C. To determine neutral, the air in the chamber was kept at a temperature slightly cooler than neutral, allowing the subjects to precisely

Uniform/stable conditions

We exposed subjects to neutral, warm and cold environments for a period of 80–120 min. Fig. 4, Fig. 5 show typical results from these tests.

Under neutral conditions, subjects’ core and average skin temperatures (calculated based on the 7-site method of Hardy and DuBois, 1938) were very stable during 2 h exposures, fluctuating within 0.1 °C. In the example test shown in Fig. 4, the core temperature became extremely stable 30 min after the test began and the mean skin temperature became stable within

Conclusion

In steady-state, uniform thermal environments, the core temperature was very stable. It responded vigorously to the cooling and warming of local body parts, always responding in the opposite direction of the skin temperature (except when applying local cooling when the whole body was already cold). The responses were observed to be more pronounced for local cooling than for local warming, supporting the concept that human body is more protective against cold than heat. These

Acknowledgments

This work was supported through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) by U.S. DOE's Office of FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies (OFCVT). The authors appreciate the support of NREL project team members Rom McGuffin, John Rugh and Rob Farrington. Delphi Harrison contributed in-kind support to make the wind tunnel testing possible. We wish to thank Taeyoung Han, Lin-Jie Huang, Greg Germaine and the volunteer subjects from Delphi Harrison.

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