This app can turn your smartphone into a thermometer to detect fever!

An app that can measure fever through your smartphone! Know all about it here.

You can measure fever with the FeverPhone app. (Pexels)

There is hardly any task that a smartphone can't do! From banking at home, education, and learning to health tracking – a smartphone does everything. Smartphones offer a variety of health and fitness apps to track activities, monitor heart rate, count steps, and log workouts too. And if you connect it with a wearable device such as fitness band or smartwatch, then it can even track your health parameters. However, if you have a fever, the thermometer is the sole medical equipment that everybody rushes to find first. But now, you don't have to do that as an app is here that can turn your smartphone into a thermometer!

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed this innovative app, which revolutionizes smartphones, enabling them to function as thermometers without the need for additional hardware.

How does FeverPhone app work

Detailed findings were published in the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. It explains that thermistors embedded within smartphones are primarily designed to monitor the temperature of the device's internal components. However, these sensors also possess sensitivity to warm objects in close proximity, opening up possibilities for measuring human body temperature and detecting fevers.

By using the device's touchscreen and repurposing the existing battery temperature sensors, the app collects data. A machine learning model then utilizes this data to estimate the core body temperatures of individuals. "These features are then used in a machine learning model to infer the user's core body temperature," the report added.

During the testing on 37 patients, the FeverPhone app showed great prowess in estimating patients' core body temperatures, with an average error of approximately 0.41 degrees Fahrenheit (0.23 degrees Celsius). This level of accuracy falls within the clinically acceptable range of 0.5 degrees Celsius, the University of Washington report suggested.

Limitations of the FeverPhone app

The researchers have identified certain areas that need additional study to overcome the limitations of the app. The study intentionally excluded participants with severe fevers surpassing 101.5 F (38.6 C) due to the ease of diagnosing such high temperatures. Also, the app may confuse sweaty skin with other skin-contact thermometers. Additionally, FeverPhone was tested solely on three specific phone models.