Climate change is intensifying the frequency and severity of weather extremes, posing growing risks to travelers’ health and safety. While the tourism sector has acknowledged these challenges, systematic monitoring of health effects during travel remains limited. Wearable technologies, ranging from smartwatches and wristbands to specialized environmental sensors, offer a promising pathway to bridge this gap. Current research shows that most studies focus on heat exposure, with limited attention to other hazards, and are largely concentrated in high-income and urban settings, neglecting vulnerable populations and low-income regions. This conceptual paper explores the role of off-the-shelf wearables in detecting and monitoring travelers’ physiological responses to climate change-induced weather extremes, including heart rate, sleep patterns, and skin temperature. The authors propose a Data Lake approach that integrates heterogeneous, real-time data streams from these wearables with environmental and geospatial datasets from climate information systems. Data Lake is a foundational technology that can be used to build a human-centred system for participatory access to information, enabling early warnings, personalized guidance, and collaborative decision-making. Such integration strengthens community resilience by allowing stakeholders, including travelers, tourism operators, and local authorities, to share, contextualize, and act on data in transparent and socially meaningful ways. By connecting tourism studies, climate science, and wearable technology, this approach highlights two main contributions: (1) a conceptual framework for embedding wearable-based health monitoring into sustainable and socially inclusive tourism practice, and (2) a roadmap for applying Data Lake approach to support human-centred and context-sensitive responses to extreme weather during travel.

Authors:
Ugljesa Stankov, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Miroslav D. Vujičić, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Biljana Basarin, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Danijela Ćirić Lalić, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Milica Solarević, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Ugljesa Stankov is a University Professor/Principal Lecturer at University of Novi Sad, Facutly of Sciences in Serbia

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ugljesastankov/

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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