This app turns your smartphone into a medical thermometer

With this app, all you have to do is bring the smartphone screen into contact with a patient's forehead to find out their body temperature. — AFP Relaxnews

Taking your body temperature is one of the few things you can’t yet do with your smartphone, but that could soon be set to change. A team of US researchers has developed an application that turns your phone into a tool for detecting whether or not you're running a fever.

These days, you're much more likely to have a smartphone to hand than a thermometer. With this in mind, researchers from the University of Washington have come up with FeverPhone, an application that can turn a smartphone into a thermometer, without the need for additional hardware. It actually uses the phone's touchscreen and battery temperature sensors to collect data, which a machine learning model then uses to estimate body temperature.

These sensors measure air temperature and the increase in heat when the phone touches the patient's forehead. Initial tests carried out on around 30 people have all proved conclusive, with an average margin of error of 0.2 degrees Celsius compared with the use of a consumer thermometer. While the machine-learning model requires much more data analysis before it can ever be truly effective on a large scale, the potential is evident.

At present, FeverPhone has only been tested on three phone models and is not available to the general public. The aim now is to optimise the results before making the application compatible with as many handsets as possible.

In particular, the idea is to relieve emergency room overcrowding by ensuring that everyone can take their temperature correctly and check whether or not they're running a fever before seeking medical attention, especially during an influenza wave or a Covid-19 epidemic. – AFP Relaxnews