Safe water at the point of work.
Our water work comes from the Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet program, including colloid removal for turbid water.
HEAT & HEALTH
Heat is a public-health emergency. Field hardware can help.
Heat-related deaths average about 546,000 a year worldwide, and more than 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat. The fixes that work are simple: water, rest, shade and hygiene. They fail in the field when water is unsafe, heat isn't measured, and equipment breaks down in the heat. That's the engineering gap Plitzie works on.
What works. And what it depends on.
At one Nicaraguan sugar mill, adding rest, shade, water and better hygiene over four harvests cut kidney injury among the hardest-working cane cutters from 21% to 1%. Every part of that depends on infrastructure: safe drinking water at the work site, sanitation, a way to measure heat stress, and hardware that keeps working when it's hot.
Where we fit. Four engineering contributions.
Rugged heat-stress sensing.
WBGT sensor nodes and wearable integrations built for hot, dusty, off-grid sites, from the same engineering behind our fielded sensor payloads.
Hardware that survives the heat.
Our Gates-funded study of Reinvent the Toilet equipment found commercial units that overheat after 30 minutes and parts that can't be sourced locally. We design for low power, 12/24 V DC and local repair from the start.
Measurement funders can compare.
Pilot metrics that track health outcomes and whether people actually adopt the intervention.