FeverPhone turns smartphones into thermometers for clinical use

It uses the phone's touchscreen and repurposes the existing battery temperature sensors to gather data that a machine learning model uses to estimate people’s core body temperatures.

When the researchers tested FeverPhone on 37 patients in an emergency department, the app is said to have estimated core body temperatures with accuracy comparable to some consumer thermometers. The team has published its findings in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. 

“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,” lead author Joseph Breda, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering said in a statement. “When I came to the UW, my adviser and I wondered how we could apply a similar technique for health. We decided to measure fever in an accessible way. The primary concern with temperature isn’t that it’s a difficult signal to measure; it’s just that people don’t have thermometers.”