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Pac-Northwest Congressional Republicans Seek NIOSH Spokane Office Reopening

• Six Congressional Republicans from the Pacific Northwest are calling on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reopen the NIOSH Spokane office.
• Reps. Michael Baumgartner, Dan Newhouse, Mike Simpson and Cliff Bentz, along with both of Idaho’s senators, Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, sent a letter asking Kennedy to reverse the Trump administration’s March decision in March to terminate most employees at the Spokane Research Laboratory.
• “If we are to increase the domestic production of minerals critical to our economic and national security, the research performed by NIOSH becomes more important than ever,” they wrote.
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Pittsburgh Safety-tech Startup Awarded $1M for Wearables Technology

• Pittsburgh’s IntelliSafe Analytics was awarded a more-than-$1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue development of wearable technology and AI models to prevent workplace accidents by providing real-time, automated safety information to workers and safety professionals.
• The company said its smartwatch technology automates the collection of safety data needed to respond to, predict and prevent accidents.
• The smartwatch measures the wearer’s skin temperature, acceleration, gyro velocity and PPG, that is, the pulsatile changes in blood volume that can be analyzed to extract information about heart rate, blood pressure, and other cardiovascular parameters.
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