I am pleased to share that I received recognition tonight at the 2025 ECU Research and Scholarship Awards Recognition Ceremony and Celebration held at the ECU Main Campus Student Center for my U.S. copyright registration of the app prototype “Temper”. I and my collaborator, Dr. Sinan Sousan, were awarded with a plaque to celebrate this achievement. A brief summary of our copyright was introduced as follows:
“We would like to recognize Dr. Jo Anne Balanay and Dr. Sinan Sousan for their official copyright registration of “Temper”: A Wet Bulb Globe Temperature-based Heat Stress App. Globally, over 2.4 billion people are at risk from excessive heat at work, which can exacerbate health conditions like heart disease, respiratory disease, and in some cases death. Although heat indices are often used to tell the public of dangerous environmental conditions, it lacks context around what a person is wearing, the intensity of the work, and associated risk. To solve this challenge, Drs. Balanay and Sousan created a novel algorithm that uses a multi-level approach to measure heat stress and risk. This algorithm has been licensed to the American Industrial Hygiene Association or AIHA. AIHA used this algorithm as a basis for their Heat Stress Mobile App, which launched this past summer, and has been featured on RFD-TV and the Weather Channel.”
