As China's most punishing heat season bears down on outdoor laborers, Nanjing has begun equipping sanitation workers with fan-cooled vests — a quiet but consequential acknowledgment that the human body has limits the calendar does not respect. Thousands of workers suffer heat-related illness each year in China, and many do not survive it, making this small wearable device part of a larger reckoning with how societies protect those who maintain the infrastructure others take for granted. The experiment in Nanjing may be modest in scale, but it points toward a future in which cooling technology
China Deploys Wearable Cooling Vests to Protect Workers During Extreme Heat
Thousands of workers experience heat-related illnesses annually, many fatal, prompting development of protective cooling devices.