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Caught fever but cannot find a thermometer around you? No worries, FeverPhone app has got you covered. A team of researchers at the University of Washington created the app to help measure temperature by simply placing the smartphone on your forehead, as per the university news.
Lead author Joseph Breda holding a phone showing body temperature | Photo Credit: -
The team tested FeverPhone on 37 patients and found that app provided the most accurate data on core body temperatures compared to consumer thermometers. The results were published on March 28 in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies.
FeverPhone app will use the touch screen and repurpose the battery temperature sensor to gather temperature-related data to give an accurate measure.
“In undergrad, I was doing research in a lab where we wanted to show that you could use the temperature sensor in a smartphone to measure air temperature,” said Lead Author Joseph Breda, a UW doctoral student.
Similar to thermometers, smartphone batteries also use tiny sensors known as thermistors to estimate body temperature. The University researchers realised they could use these sensors to track heat transfer between a person and a phone. The phone touchscreen could sense skin-to-phone contact, and the thermistors can measure the air temperature and the rise in core body heat.
How to use FeverPhone app
To use the app, a person simply needs to hold up the phone, close to the forehead like a point-and-shoot camera. The forefingers and thumbs need to touch the corner edges to reduce heat from the hands being sensed. Next, press the touchscreen against your forehead for 90 seconds (which the researchers found is the ideal time to sense the body temperature) to know the accurate temperature.
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