Gentherm

1. Automotive engineering has spent decades studying temperature, comfort, safety, and human performance. What makes this expertise relevant to challenges beyond transportation?

Automotive environments are controlled microclimates built around the human body. One important aspect of automotive thermal management is that we design for both transient and steady-state conditions. For example, when someone gets into a vehicle on a winter morning, the cabin may be freezing. The first challenge is to restore comfort quickly through a highly responsive thermal system. Once comfort is restored, the challenge shifts to maintaining that comfort steadily for the rest of the drive, without over-heating, over-cooling, or wasting energy. That understanding of dynamic thermal control is highly relevant beyond transportation and provides expertise when you need to quickly heat or cool someone, or maintain the thermal environment efficiently. Gentherm has developed solutions that leverage different mechanisms of heat exchange and combine them with thermophysiology — the study of how the human body regulates temperature. We consider how temperature, airflow, contact surfaces, posture, clothing, and individual variability influence comfort, alertness, and safety. Those same physiological principles apply in other environments, including offices, home and clinical settings, where thermal conditions can also influence human experience, performance, and outcomes.

2. What are the key similarities—and important differences—between managing thermal comfort for vehicle occupants and maintaining thermal stability for patients?

At a basic level, both are about supporting the body’s ability to maintain thermal balance, but the priorities are fundamentally different. In an automotive environment, occupants are conscious and have their physiological responses intact. This means they are able to adjust their thermal environment to maintain thermal balance and their key motivation is thermal comfort.  The technology in automotive is primarily designed to influence skin temperature to maintain thermal comfort. In a hospital setting, a patient in the OR will be anaesthetized, which essentially inhibits their ability to regulate their body temperature via physiological or behavioral mechanism and as a result their core temperature can drop to dangerously low levels. The priority then becomes maintaining core body temperature within a safe range. Similar principles of heat transfer can be applied, but the design objective changes: instead of creating a localized comfort sensation, the goal is to deliver controlled thermal support across enough of the body surface to help protect core temperature. So the difference is not just the technology itself, but the physiological state of the person receiving it and the clinical stakes of the outcome.

3. What does the science of human thermal regulation tell us about the relationship between temperature, comfort, safety, and performance, both in vehicles and healthcare environments?

Thermoregulation is one of the body’s core homeostatic systems because it is vital for human survival. It is influenced by two important control mechanisms: behavioral and autonomic thermoregulation. Behavioral thermoregulation refers to the choices we make to stay comfortable, such as changing clothing, adjusting the thermostat, or turning a heated seat on or off. Autonomic thermoregulation refers to the body’s involuntary physiological responses, such as changing blood flow to the skin, sweating, or shivering. When we move outside our thermal comfort zone, the body first relies on behavioral responses to restore comfort. If those responses are not sufficient and the body continues to move away from thermal balance, autonomic responses engage. Both can impact comfort, safety and performance: behavioral responses can distract from concentration, attention, and focus, while autonomic responses are metabolically costly and can place additional strain on the body. In vehicles, poor thermal management can affect comfort, attention, and safety. In healthcare, especially for vulnerable or anesthetized patients, thermal imbalance can contribute to physiological stress and may influence the recovery process.

4. How have advances in automotive human-factors engineering influenced the way engineers approach the design of technologies around human needs, and how can those principles inform medical device innovation?

Automotive human-factors engineering has evolved significantly. Historically, much of the focus was on vehicle performance, but modern vehicle design is increasingly centered on the end-user experience: comfort, perception, usability, safety, and personalization inside the cabin. That shift has required automotive engineers to develop technologies that are safe and effective for a very wide range of users, including differences in body size, posture, age, sensitivity and personal preferences.

That mindset is highly relevant to medical device innovation. In both settings, the technology has to work for real people, not idealized users. The difference in healthcare is that the person may be vulnerable, sedated, or unable to respond for themselves, so the design must account for physiology, clinical workflow, safety, and usability from the beginning. The broader lesson is that effective technology is not just about what the system can do; it is about how safely and meaningfully it supports the person using or receiving it.

5. What thermal-management challenges can patients face during lengthy or complex medical procedures, and why can maintaining appropriate body temperature become particularly important in these situations? 

The thermal management challenges are really faced by the clinician and lead to outcomes exhibited by their patients. Some of the challenges clinicians face in adequately warming surgical patients can be related to large exposed surgical areas, particularly in the abdomen/torso where much of the body’s core heat can be lost; the limitations presented by the inability to provide adequate skin surface warming due to position and/or the surgical procedure characteristics (robot access, required positioning devices) and in many cases, the patient’s own medical condition (peripheral vascular disease, diabetes) can limit warming capabilities. Patients who are subjected to these types of warming challenges during their procedures are at the greatest risk for intraoperative hypothermia and its related outcomes like altered drug metabolism, cardiac disturbances/arrhythmia, excessive bleeding/coagulopathy, and delayed wound healing to name a few. 

Intraoperative hypothermia is initially caused by a redistribution temperature drop (RTD) caused by anesthesia medications acting on the central nervous system, preventing a patient from properly regulating their core body temperature. This process has three phases, where the first phase, redistribution, lasts about 60 minutes and is the time of the largest and fastest drop in temperature (1.6oC). Temperature decline slows dramatically during phase two, the linear phase, and by the third phase, plateau, occurring at the 3-5 hour mark, the rate of temperature drop has all but leveled off. What this translates to is, in a longer procedure, there is more time to prevent hypothermia and/or work to reverse it. In a short surgery however (an hour or less), the ability to diminish that steep drop in temperature is a much greater challenge. Without a method of active warming in place at the start of the procedure, there is almost no way to prevent a patient from becoming hypothermic due to RTD. In your more complex surgical procedures, longer than 3-5 hours, the hypothermia challenge essentially switches to that of heat loss to the environment versus RTD, where open body cavities and exposed skin are heavily influenced by the room temp and air currents.

6. How can lessons from automotive thermal engineering help healthcare engineers develop more precise, responsive, and efficient approaches to patient temperature management?

Healthcare engineers already bring deep knowledge of clinical workflows, patient safety, and end-user impact. Automotive thermal engineers bring a different but complementary strength: exceptional knowledge of product component capabilities, performance limits, efficiency, and responsive control. Our engineers know their products extremely well — how to deliver heating or cooling locally, efficiently, and reliably under changing conditions. The opportunity is to meet in the middle: combining that product and component expertise with a deeper understanding of patient physiology and clinical need. The body is not a black box, and it should not be treated that way. More precise and effective patient temperature management will come from designing systems that understand both the technology and the human being receiving thermal input.

7. Beyond temperature itself, how should factors such as patient positioning, pressure, comfort, and procedure duration be considered when designing technologies for the operating room?

Procedure duration is almost impossible to control– things happen that cannot be predicted, and the surgical team’s ultimate responsibility is to perform a successful and complete procedure regardless of time. That said, making sure the patient is properly positioned, protected from the risk of pressure injury and secured safely are key ways to assure the patient’s post operative injury risk is minimized. It is a standard concept in the operating room to prepare for the worst case situation because once the procedure begins, making adjustments to positioning, protection and security are nearly impossible tasks.

Devices that work across these three core aspects of patient safety are often useful from a workflow and time perspective, as long as there is no compromise made to any single aspect. Clinicians are always looking for ways to do more with less, as the cost of hospital care increases. For example, it is standard care for the lithotomy stirrups to be padded, which covers positioning and pressure injury prevention together. This cross function can be seen in several other examples of securement and positioning combined. Patient comfort is ultimately the end result of properly managing these various aspects, since the anesthetized patient will not be aware of their level of comfort until they have awakened from the procedure. The exception to this is temperature sensation prior to anesthesia– cold OR tables, cold procedure rooms, cold IV fluids, etc. can all affect patient comfort before the procedure begins. It is also the one aspect of overall comfort that patients call out in satisfaction surveys.

8. When an engineering principle moves from the automotive sector into healthcare, what needs to change to account for the very different safety, regulatory, clinical, and human requirements?

The core engineering principle may transfer, but the design controls have to change significantly. Both automotive and medical device development use structured approaches such as the V-model, which makes it a useful bridge between industries. In both cases, the goal is to connect user needs to system requirements, design inputs, verification testing, and validation. What changes in healthcare is the context: there are additional requirements around patient safety, biocompatibility, cleaning, reliability, usability, risk management, clinical evidence, and regulatory compliance. The solution has to work technically, but it also has to work safely within a clinical system,  and for the person receiving the technology. 

9. How can collaboration between engineers, clinicians, researchers, and other specialists help translate expertise from one industry into meaningful solutions for another?

Cross-industry translation only works when different experts are involved early. Engineers understand the technology, clinicians understand workflow and patient risk, and researchers help test assumptions with evidence. The best solutions come when those perspectives are combined before the design is locked.

At Gentherm, we have seen that some automotive thermal technologies are technically mature and highly capable, but not always easy to commercialize in automotive because of cost, packaging, or market constraints. In healthcare, however, similar capabilities can become highly relevant when they help modernize older, less efficient, or less responsive approaches. Successfully moving technology across industries requires more than technical transfer; it requires engineers, clinicians, researchers, and commercial teams to come together early to understand both the constraints and the opportunities. The key is bringing the right experts together early so the technology is not simply transferred, but thoughtfully adapted to the clinical environment and the needs of the end user. That combination of automotive thermal expertise, healthcare insight, and human physiology is where Gentherm can offer something distinct and this year we’ve started to see the benefits with the launch of ThermAffyxTM - a product that was co-developed between our medical and automotive engineers. There’s plenty more in our development pipeline, which is super exciting.

10. Can you share an example of how automotive thermal-management or human-factors knowledge has been adapted to address a healthcare challenge, and what broader lessons emerged from that experience?

One example is ThermAffyx, where we were able to apply automotive thermal-management knowledge to a healthcare challenge. In automotive seating, sensors help us control the temperature of heated surfaces, and we use heat-transfer models to understand how energy moves through different materials toward the skin. Ideally, temperature sensing would be positioned as close to the person as possible, but in an automotive seat that is not always feasible because of seat construction, durability, comfort, and packaging constraints. As a result we have a lot of experience with different sensor placements and adjusting the temperature control to optimize heat transfer. 

Similar considerations emerged when developing ThermAffyx. We wanted to deliver controlled heat transfer to a patient, but sensor placement had to account for the clinical environment, including the need to avoid interfering with X-ray imaging and clinical workflow. Our automotive experience was valuable because we already had deep knowledge of surface temperature control, material heat transfer, human positioning, and how to infer what is happening at the body interface when sensors cannot be placed exactly where you would ideally want them. The broader lesson is that cross-industry innovation is not about copying a technology from one setting to another. It is about understanding the physics, the physiology, and the constraints of the use environment well enough to adapt the solution safely and meaningfully.

11. What can automotive companies learn from healthcare’s evolving technology needs, particularly when it comes to patient safety, clinical usability, human variability, and designing for sensitive applications?

Healthcare is a useful reminder that technology must perform in complex, high-stakes human environments. Automotive companies can learn from healthcare’s focus on safety, usability, traceability, and designing for people who may be vulnerable or highly variable. It pushes engineering to think beyond performance metrics and consider real-world human consequences.

12. How could technologies such as sensors, real-time monitoring, data analytics, and intelligent control systems further advance human thermal management in healthcare?

The use of sensors in warming and the presence of real-time, accurate core temperature monitoring are critical components in the battle to prevent intraoperative hypothermia. It has always been said–you cannot control what you cannot measure. Additionally, a key factor in facilities and clinicians preventing intraoperative hypothermia by changing warming practices is knowing the rate at which it is occurring in their patients overall. This can only be done through the collection and analysis of the actual data. 

13. Beyond thermal management, are there other areas of automotive engineering or expertise that you believe could have unexpected applications in healthcare?

One area of opportunity is to take technologies that were originally designed to improve the in-cabin human experience and explore how they could support the body in clinical environments where positioning, pressure, comfort, and safety are all tightly connected.

14. Looking ahead, why do you believe cross-industry innovation will become increasingly important, and how could applying expertise from one sector to another reshape the way we solve complex healthcare challenges?

Both automotive and healthcare challenges are increasingly complex, and no single industry has all the answers. Cross-industry innovation allows us to translate proven engineering knowledge into new contexts, while adapting it to different human needs, safety requirements, and the environments in which it is used. Both industries are highly regulated and safety-focused, with useful overlaps in how technology is designed, validated, manufactured, and scaled. The key is understanding where adaptation is needed so technology is not simply transferred between industries, but thoughtfully redesigned for the environment and the person it will serve. The real opportunity is to recognize that, no matter the industry, there is a person using or receiving the technology. That common denominator is the human body. Cross-industry innovation becomes most powerful when proven engineering capability is paired with a deep understanding of physiology, so solutions are not only technically effective, but meaningful for the person they are designed to support. At Gentherm we have a talented team and it's always an exciting conversation when we bring those talented team members with their expertise into one room.