Dehydration and overheating

The most obvious interpretation of high body temperature is overheating. If the body is unable to cool itself down for a long period of time, the first symptoms of overheating appear: goosebumps, nausea, and significant breakdown in performance since all the remaining energy is used for the cooling process.
How can you counteract dangerous overheating?
By hydrating, wearing breathable clothes, slowing physical exertion, or by using different methods to cool your body (e.g. with cooling vests).
Once the body is overheated, there is no easy way of recovering through hydration or other cooling actions. Your body needs a rather long recovery time to reach the normal level of performance again, highlighting with that the importance of preventing overheating in first place. One good way to do this is by continuously monitoring your level of dehydration with a device measuring your body temperature.

cosinuss° aims to solve this unsolved problem and wants to provide a sensor device that is able to monitor dehydration/overheating continuously during activity. Athletes will be informed about their dehydration level using a color system. When a dangerous zone is entered, one or several of the above mentioned actions need to be taken in order to prevent overheating.

Determination of performance

Another use of continuous body temperature data lies in the increased accuracy of other performance measures. This is based on the fact that body temperature exerts significant influence on the heart rate:

Your heart rate increases almost proportionally with performance when you start exercising. Thus, in this initial period there´s a very good correlation between heart rate and performance which makes heart rate a legitimate parameter for performance control. This, however, changes when your body temperature rises above normal, and the life-sustaining cooling process of your body kicks in. Cooling is primarily achieved through perspiration and heat emission. Heat transport from the inside to the periphery of the body is achieved through your blood and the dense network of veins and arteries between skin and hypoderm. If there is more heat to be dissipated than normal, the main blood circulation increases to eight to twelve times its normal rate. Consequently, your heart has to beat more often and so heart rate increases. This increase in heart rate, however, is not caused by performance but solely by the cooling process! This detail can result in huge mistakes sneaking into performance calculations that are only based on heart rate.

If you can monitor heart rate and body temperature together you have the data to eliminate this error. Consequently, it will be possible to determine individual performance limits of athletes with significantly higher accuracy, enabling better exercise control and improvements in performance.
cosinuss° is pursuing this approach in cooperation with renowned universities in order to bring performance measures to the next level.