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As the death toll from Europe’s ongoing heatwave climbs past 30,000, scientists are urging companies to consider unconventional cooling solutions for their offices. Instead, they directed airflow from each device toward a life-sized, 23-segment thermal manikin modeled after an average Scandinavian man. Among them: wearable neck fans, a nearly 20-year-old gadget which has long struggled to gain mainstream acceptance due to its ‘dork factor’.
A recent study in the journal E3S Web of Conferences found that portable neck and face fans performed nearly as well as bladeless desk fans in keeping office workers cool, according to a report by Popular Science. they offered key advantages: lower energy use, less disruption to coworkers, and targeted cooling for thermosensitive areas like the neck and face While not as powerful as traditional bladed fans. Researchers tested four devices — a neck fan, a face fan, a bladed desktop fan, and a bladeless desk fan — each evaluated at both low and high speed settings. To avoid the subjectivity of asking human subjects how comfortable they felt, the team removed humans from the experiment entirely. The manikin was outfitted with sensors that continuously track skin temperature, heat loss, and predicted thermal comfort across different regions of the body, allowing researchers to measure precisely how quickly its surface cooled and returned to a comfortable baseline.