Alabama football to use new heat safety technology

The University of Alabama football program is adopting heat safety technology HeatSense, a new fitness tracker that measures athletes’ core body temperature and is meant to manage heat strain, according to a report from the Montgomery Advertiser.

HeatSense is a new technology from founder and CEO Melissa Fortenberry, who started the company to create visibility into how athletes respond individually to heat stress. The technology combines core temperature, heart rate and wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a metric for measuring environmental heat stress on the human body.

According to the Montgomery Advertiser report, Alabama football will become HeatSense’s first customer in August.

Several members of the HeatSense team went to an Alabama practice in March and put trackers on 10 players, and Fortenberry told the Montgomery Advertiser that the feedback from the players validated her findings.

Fortenberry hopes to reach three to five Division I programs over the course of the summer.

“Outdoor sports are becoming extreme environments,” Fortenberry said on the HeatSense website. “HeatSense is how we move from reaction to readiness—bringing individualized visibility to the sideline when it matters most.”

HeatSense is guided by a medical advisory board made up of doctors specializing in thermoregulation with expertise in the interactions between heat, climate and the human body.