Heidari Hamidreza, Golbabaei Farideh, Shamsipour Aliakbar, Rahimi Forushani Abbas, Gaeini Abbasali
a Research Center for Environmental Pollutants , Qom University of Medical Sciences , Iran.
b Department of Occupational Health , Tehran University of Medical Sciences , Iran.
Int J Occup Saf Ergon. 2018 Jun;24(2):224-232. doi: 10.1080/10803548.2017.1281524. Epub 2017 May 2.
The aims of this study were (a) to assess the agreement coefficient between tympanic temperatures and the most popular and valid heat stress index, wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), in outdoor environments; (b) to determine a cut-off point for tympanic temperature as a heat strain index for evaluation of outdoor workers.
1452 measurements of WBGT index and tympanic temperature were recorded for outdoor workers from nine different climatic regions. Consistency of the WBGT and tympanic temperature were tested. The cut-off point for tympanic temperature in outdoor environments regarding WBGT evaluation was suggested based on obtained sensitivity and specificity from a receiver operating characteristic curve.
The results showed that there were numerous situations in which WBGT exceeded the reference value, whilst the measured values of tympanic temperature rarely reached a permissible value for core temperature (38 °C). Therefore, appropriate consistency of results between the heat stress and strain indices was not achieved.
The criterion of tympanic temperature equaling 37 °C was suggested as a cut-off point for tympanic temperature as a heat strain index for outdoor environment evaluation.
本研究的目的是：（a）评估室外环境中鼓膜温度与最常用且有效的热应激指数湿球黑球温度（WBGT）之间的一致性系数；（b）确定作为评估室外工作者热应激指标的鼓膜温度的临界值。
记录了来自九个不同气候区域的室外工作者的1452次WBGT指数和鼓膜温度测量值。测试了WBGT与鼓膜温度的一致性。根据从受试者工作特征曲线获得的敏感性和特异性，提出了室外环境中与WBGT评估相关的鼓膜温度临界值。
结果表明，在许多情况下，WBGT超过了参考值，而鼓膜温度的测量值很少达到核心温度的允许值（38°C）。因此，热应激和热应变指数之间未实现适当的结果一致性。
建议将鼓膜温度等于37°C的标准作为鼓膜温度作为室外环境评估热应变指数的临界值。
