Texas Researchers Make A Heatstroke Calculator for Burn Victims
- Myriam Vidal Valero
- Oct 6
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 10
35-year-old Kechi Okwuchi loves to jog, but as a burn survivor from a plane crash almost 20 years ago, she faces challenges adjusting to her new reality. Her sweat glands no longer function normally, which means hot days can easily put her at risk of experiencing heatstroke.
On an early August afternoon, the Houston-based motivational speaker, singer, and former America's Got Talent golden buzzer recipient puts on some clothes with cooling fabrics, her sneakers, a pair of sunglasses, and headphones, ready to take on the sweltering heat.
Her intuition tells her it is a bad idea. In the past, whenever she has misjudged the state of the weather and gone out on a hot day, she has put her health at risk. “I can feel the heat inside my body, and there’s no outlet. There’s no release. There’s no regulation,” Okwuchi says.
But a simple tool changed her life. This July, researchers at the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center launched a Burn Survivor Heat Risk Calculator, with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through its National Institute of General Medical Sciences and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the U.S. Department of Defense
The Calculator helps burn survivors assess their heat risk during physical activity, offering recommendations based on location, activity level, and surface area of burns. All Okwuchi has to do is type in her height, weight, the surface area of the burns that cover her body, and a few other vitals. She is taken aback when her intuition turns out to be right: heading out right now would be extremely dangerous and could trigger heatstroke for a woman whose burns cover 65% of her body.
Extreme heat poses a significant threat to millions of people worldwide, particularly to burn victims, who have lost the ability to regulate their internal body temperatures through the natural process of homeostasis.
Okwuchi is one of nearly 9 million burn survivors worldwide, a group of people who don’t always feel comfortable stepping out of their shell and who now face a new barrier during hotter summers. They are forced to stay indoors even if they want to go out, cutting them off from hobbies, friends, and the small joys of a life already reshaped by burns. And as summer temperatures keep rising every year in the U.S. and the rest of the world, bringing record-breaking summers, the window of isolation grows for burn survivors.
These sedentary lives due to injuries and heat intolerance can take a serious toll on both their physical and mental health, says Craig G. Crandall, professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas’s Southwestern Medical Center, who led the development of the Calculator. Lack of physical activity can put burn survivors at risk of developing new illnesses. While advances in medicine have given millions of burn patients another chance at a normal life, a warming world erodes its quality, says Sharmila Dissanaike, chair of surgery at the University of New Mexico and former president of the American Burn Association, who did not participate in the study.
The brutal summers, Okwuchi says, are inhibiting the choices of “an already restricted community (...) It's like taking a step forward and two back.”
The heat risk calculator is a first-of-its-kind, research-backed tool that transforms the lives of burn survivors. To build the calculator, Crandall and other researchers adapted a model developed by Andrew P. Gagge that examines how the body’s temperature-regulating mechanisms — such as sweating, shivering, and changes in blood flow — respond to environmental factors including temperature, air movement, and humidity. They adjusted these mechanisms to account for reduced sweating, depending on the area of burn injury.
Gagge’s model has been widely used in thermal comfort research, climate control systems, occupational health, and climate physiology. The Texan researchers tested their predictions in several lab trials with both adults with burn injuries as well as healthy adults with simulated burns, under temperatures between 25–39 °C and humidity conditions between 20–40%, while participants exercised at varying intensities.
Being one of the study participants, Okwuchi played an integral role in developing this tool, running on a treadmill or cycling in a lab to mimic real-life activity scenarios, while devices attached to her body tracked her vitals, including body temperature. She recalls situations where researchers kept her running until she could no longer go on, comparing her body’s responses in situations where she was sprayed with hot water, cold water, or no water at all.
Given the impacts that climate change has on heat-related diseases in people, several companies have developed wearable devices that monitor the body’s core temperature. But none of them so far have been designed for those with disabilities, including burn survivors.
In fact, disability-focused climate change research and policy still have a long way to go, says Michael Ashley Stein, co-founder and Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. In a 2024 study, Stein and others explained that people with disabilities are systematically excluded from climate change-related policies and decision-making. “There's insufficient [research] on heat and disability,” Stein says.
The study, which assessed over 1,600 climate adaptation articles, found that only 1% took disabilities into account. There is also no disability-focused constituency within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whereas there are several for other minority groups, including Indigenous communities, women and gender minorities, and youth.
While not all burn survivors feel comfortable wearing a “disability label,” Okwuchi says, this leaves them in a gray area, coupled with the lack of research on burn survivors’ responses to external heat. This research has mostly focused on their survival, but not the physical or mental aftermath, explains Amy Acton, Chief Executive Officer for Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors, a burn survivor and a former burn nurse herself who helped develop the Calculator.
“You won’t find burn survivors in [most disability education materials]” because they are often off the radar, Dissanaike adds. “It’s a small population that tends to be overlooked.”
Crandall and his team secured renewed funding for the next phase of this project through the NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator Award, one of the few programs that were not casualties of the $2 billion cuts in NIH research grants by the Trump administration. The long-term support and flexibility afforded by programs such as R35 allow researchers like Crandall to take bigger risks in pursuit of high-impact projects for neglected communities like this one.
They plan to study heat stress in construction workers who have previously survived burns, in the hope that they can offer recommendations to their employers to adjust work cycles and minimise any increases in core temperatures. (House Bill 2127, a sweeping 2023 state law to dilute the policy-making power of Democratic-leaning urban areas, was upheld by an appeals court in July; it eliminated local ordinances passed by Dallas and Austin mandating water breaks for construction workers.)
Okwuchi’s optimism has always prevailed amidst chaos, confusion, and the numerous medical procedures she has undergone since her near-fatal tragedy at the age of 16. She still has to deal with the feeling of relentless itching, a common complication burn survivors face that has no new medical intervention in sight. But now, when the increasingly harsh Gulf Coast summers constantly test her patience, this calculator comes to her aid.
Although she is not happy about rescheduling her afternoon run, Okwuchi says she is grateful that she can avoid another bout of thermal stress. “Now you don’t have to actually go out in the heat and test out how much you can take,” Okwuchi says.
