MAKING A DIFFERENCE
Her App Could Save Lives
Calor: Heat Safety for Farms
As the morning sun burns through the dusty haze of California’s extravagantly fertile Central Valley, developer Faith Florez heads east off Highway 99 and disappears into 300 acres of ripening grapes.
The beat of a norteño tune pulses through the fields. Dragonflies twirl across the vines. With the temperature headed for triple digits on this late-summer day, the pickers and packers look almost mummified: hoodies, kerchiefs, bandannas, sombreros.
“Just standing out here now, it’s so hot,” says Florez, a freshman at the University of Southern California, whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents all toiled in nearby orchards and vineyards. “I can’t even imagine.”
To help protect one of the nation’s most vulnerable workforces, Florez is bringing technology to the broiling California interior that served as her family’s stepping stone. As a high school student in a comfortable Los Angeles suburb, she conceived of Calor (Spanish for “heat” but also “human warmth”), a bilingual app that uses videos, quizzes, and notifications to remind farmworkers of the dangers that outdoor labor poses.
From the blueberry fields of Washington to the tomato fields of Georgia, extreme heat claims the lives of four agricultural workers on average every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a rate 20 times higher than that of the nonmilitary U.S. workforce.
“My mission is to change the statement ‘work or health’ to ‘work and health,’” Florez wrote on her crowdfunding page, which last year raised more than $60,000, including contributions from Latino luminaries Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eva Longoria, and Gina Rodriguez.
“I was in school, and I would just receive the notifications in my email—oh, this person has donated—and freak out in class,” says Florez, who had coding help from a team of grad students at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering.
The result is an Apple Watch–specific app that prompts farmworkers to drink water and seek shade at regular intervals. When the temperature hits 95 degrees, Calor sends additional alerts about heat-stress symptoms to watch out for.
The app also monitors each wearer’s heart rate and steps; and if a worker does experience distress, the Apple Watch’s SOS feature can guide first responders to a precise location, even deep in the fields, where there would otherwise be no address.
“In this heat, you really have to be conscientious,” says Horacio Soto, one of five workers at Fabbri Farms on the outskirts of Bakersfield who volunteered to spend the day with a Florez-issued Apple Watch. As he loads bunches of crisp Sweet Globe grapes into Styrofoam crates bound for Asia, he recalls a scare of his own, on a blazing day a dozen years ago.
“I was in a cold sweat—a very ugly feeling,” says Soto (now in his forties), who keeps an eye on coworkers, usually younger and inclined to think of themselves as invincible. “The body is like a car. It can run well, but then all of a sudden it overheats.”
Although the app is designed for farmworkers, Florez recognizes that a largely immigrant, minimum-wage demographic may lack the resources to take advantage of it, so she has set her sights on their employers. She’s learned to speak of efficiencies and return on investment, and plans to lobby the state to lower workers-compensation rates for agribusinesses that invest in Calor.
“The goal is to make the workplace safer,” says Jeff Fabbri, the grape magnate who blessed Florez’s demo, as he takes shelter from the midday sun under a row of draping vines. “To the extent we can do that through communication, through distributing information, we’re very, very open to it.”