The Sweating Mannequin: Arizona’s Bizarre Answer To Dehydration

Arizona summers are brutal, there's no way around it. Year in and year out it seems like heat records are broken in the Grand Canyon State.

While state officials are working tirelessly to mitigate the damages, a group of researchers at Arizona State University have been looking into how the heat affects the human body...

without a human body.

Meet ANDI!

ASU's newest project may be its most revolutionary. ANDI is a state of the art piece of equipment, custom built by Thermetrics for Arizona State. What makes ANDI special? He functions as the perfect human test subject.

ANDI's primary function is to mimic the human body's thermal functions. As such, he can breathe, shiver, generate heat, and sweat. While there are 10 copies of ANDI across the globe, most used for garment tests, ASU's in the only one suited for outdoor testing, due to a state-of-the-art internal cooling system.

Get our free mobile app

What is ANDI Used For?

The ASU ANDI project is a reaction to 2022's massive heat wave, and it has only been spurred further by last years devastating summer. The team hopes to use ANDI to better understand the effect extreme heat has on the human body.

One of the best aspects of the study is the "heat chamber" that allows for testing in theoretically hot temperatures. While these may not become reality for some time, they are still on the horizon if we don't change something soon.

Conducting this research now will allow us to better understand our future if the planet keeps heating up, and how we can persist (and perspire) through it.

[Arizona State University]

[CBS]