On August 14, 2026, Cal/OSHA released an updated draft of its heat illness prevention standards — the regulations that govern how California employers protect workers from heat-related illness both indoors and outdoors (Title 8, Sections 3395 and 3396). This is the latest step in the state’s ongoing update to its heat regulation, and most of the changes are technical: aligning terminology between the indoor and outdoor rules, adding rhabdomyolysis to the list of recognized heat illnesses, and revising the acclimatization schedule for new and returning workers.
But one addition is worth pausing on, because it marks a meaningful shift in how regulators are thinking about heat safety technology.
What the draft actually says
Buried in the new language is a provision giving Cal/OSHA the authority to issue an “Order to Take Special Action” at a specific worksite — a mechanism the Division can use when it determines an employer’s existing heat illness prevention measures aren’t sufficient. The draft explicitly names wearable technology as one of the actions the Division could require:
“The Division may require an employer to take additional actions to prevent employee heat illness in employees through the issuance of an Order to Take Special Action. Such additional actions may include, but are not limited to, the use of wearable technology that monitors the user’s physiological responses to heat stress, where the employer is responsible for ensuring that health data is kept secure and not used to discriminate against employees.”
A few things are worth unpacking here.
It’s not a blanket mandate. This isn’t Cal/OSHA requiring every employer in every affected industry to hand out wearables tomorrow. It’s a targeted enforcement tool — something the Division could require at a specific site with a documented problem, similar to how special orders already work for other hazards. Employers with strong existing heat programs are unlikely to be affected directly.
It’s still a draft. The regulation hasn’t been finalized, and the public comment period is open through September 21, 2026. Employers, industry groups, labor organizations, and safety professionals all have a window to weigh in before this becomes enforceable text.
The data language matters. Notably, the draft doesn’t just mention wearables — it pairs that mention with an explicit requirement that employers secure the resulting health data and not use it to discriminate against workers. That’s not boilerplate. It reflects a set of concerns that have been building in the safety community for a while now.
This isn’t coming out of nowhere
In December 2025, California’s Commission on Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation (CHSWC) heard a presentation on wearable physiological monitoring, drawing on a study of wildland firefighters using arm-worn sensors to track heart rate, heart rate variability, and core body temperature in real time. The discussion spent real time on the hard questions: Will monitoring be required or optional? Will workers feel safe requesting rest when a device flags a risk? Could the data be used to push productivity past safe limits, or used against a worker in a personnel decision?
The guardrails proposed at that meeting: individual data access restricted to limit misuse, alerts routed to the worker before anyone else, protections against retaliation, line up closely with the language that showed up in August’s draft rule. Meaning the regulatory text appears to be catching up to a conversation that occupational health researchers and worker advocates were already having.
What else changed in the draft
The August update also revised the acclimatization requirements for new and returning workers, the schedule that phases employees into full workloads after time away from a hot job site. The previous draft required a five-day ramp starting at 20% of normal workload on day one. The new draft offers employers an alternative: shift-start training in place of the hours restriction, plus a less restrictive schedule specifically for returning workers, who can now start at 50% of normal workload and reach 80% by day three, a notably faster return to full duty than the original proposal allowed.
Why this matters for employers now
Even though the wearable provision is discretionary, it signals where Cal/OSHA’s thinking is headed. Heat illness enforcement is moving from “did you provide water and shade” toward “do you have visibility into what’s actually happening in a worker’s body under exposure.” Employers in high-heat industries — construction, agriculture, landscaping, oil and gas extraction, transportation — would be well served by understanding this shift now, rather than waiting for an Order to Take Special Action to force the issue.
That’s also why the data protections in the draft deserve attention on their own. Any physiological monitoring program, whether adopted voluntarily or under an order, has to be built to keep health data secure and firewalled from being used punitively. That’s not just a regulatory checkbox — it’s the difference between a program workers trust and one they resist.
It’s a standard we hold SafeGuard to as well. Worker-first alerts, strict data access controls, and a hard line against punitive use of physiological data aren’t things we added because a regulator asked — they’re baked into how the platform is built. But it’s worth saying plainly: no product on the market today is “pre-certified” for a rule that hasn’t been finalized, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. What we can offer is a system built around the same principles the draft rule — and the researchers who informed it — are asking for.
What to do before September 21
If you’re an employer, safety director, or industry association with a stake in this, the draft is worth reading in full before the comment window closes. You can review the current language and submit feedback directly through Cal/OSHA’s rulemaking page:
dir.ca.gov/dosh/doshreg/heat-illness
We’ll keep tracking this Cal/OSHA heat regulation as it moves through 2026 and will post updates as the comment period closes and the standards board moves toward a final vote.