1. Novel Analytic Methods Needed for Real-Time Continuous Core Body Temperature Data
- Author
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Joan Flocks, Abby Mutic, Linda McCauley, J. Antonio Tovar-Aguilar, Vicki S. Hertzberg, Nathan Mutic, Eugenia Economos, Valerie Mac, Lisa Elon, and Katherine Peterman
- Subjects
education.field_of_study ,Threshold limit value ,Computer science ,business.industry ,Population ,Big data ,Functional data analysis ,030210 environmental & occupational health ,01 natural sciences ,010104 statistics & probability ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Indicator function ,Statistics ,0101 mathematics ,Time point ,education ,business ,General Nursing ,Smoothing ,Environmental epidemiology - Abstract
Affordable measurement of core body temperature (Tc) in a continuous, real-time fashion is now possible. With this advance comes a new data analysis paradigm for occupational epidemiology. We characterize issues arising after obtaining Tc data over 188 workdays for 83 participating farmworkers, a population vulnerable to effects of rising temperatures due to climate change. We describe a novel approach to these data using smoothing and functional data analysis. This approach highlights different data aspects compared with describing Tc at a single time point or summaries of the time course into an indicator function (e.g., did Tc ever exceed 38 °C, the threshold limit value for occupational heat exposure). Participants working in ferneries had significantly higher Tc at some point during the workday compared with those working in nurseries, despite a shorter workday for fernery participants. Our results typify the challenges and opportunities in analyzing Big Data streams from real-time physiologic monitoring.
- Published
- 2016
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