Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have created an app called “FeverPhone” that can transform smartphones into thermometers without requiring any additional hardware. The app utilizes existing sensors in smartphones to estimate whether individuals have fevers, making it the first of its kind. Joseph Breda, a doctoral student at UW and the lead author of the study, explained that the idea stemmed from previous research on using smartphone temperature sensors to measure air temperature. The team decided to apply a similar technique to health monitoring by measuring fever in an accessible way, considering the fact that many people do not have thermometers readily available.
The findings of the study were published on March 28 in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. FeverPhone operates by utilizing the thermistors present in smartphones to monitor the temperature of the device’s internal components. These sensors are also sensitive to external sources of heat, which is leveraged by the app. To estimate a person’s core body temperature, the individual places the phone’s touchscreen against their forehead. The app captures temperature and raw capacitance data from the thermistor and touchscreen, respectively, to analyze heat transfer rates from the body to the device. A machine learning model then uses these features to infer the user’s core body temperature.
A clinical trial of FeverPhone was conducted at the emergency department of UW’s School of Medicine. Thirty-seven participants, including 16 individuals with mild fever, were recruited for the trial. During the test, participants pressed the smartphone touchscreen against their foreheads for 90 seconds. The results demonstrated that FeverPhone estimated core body temperatures with an average error of approximately 0.41 Fahrenheit (0.23 degrees Celsius), which falls within the clinically acceptable range of 0.5 Fahrenheit.
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