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Taking human body temperature is one of the few things you can’t do with your smartphone yet. That could soon change. A team of American researchers has developed an application that transforms the phone into a tool capable of detecting whether or not you have a fever.
Nowadays, it is much easier to have your smartphone handy than a thermometer. In this spirit, researchers from the University of Washington came up with the idea of FeverPhone, an application capable of transforming a telephone into a thermometer, without the need to add any hardware. It actually uses the phone’s touchscreen and battery temperature sensors to gather data that a machine learning model then uses to estimate anyone’s body temperature.
These sensors measure the air temperature and the increase in heat until the phone touches the patient’s forehead. The first tests carried out on around thirty people all proved to be relevant, with an average margin of error of 0.2 degrees compared to the use of a consumer thermometer. Its machine learning model, however, requires a lot more data to analyze in order to be truly effective at scale one day, but the potential is definitely there.
FeverPhone has only been tested on three phone models and is not available to the general public. The objective now is to optimize the results before making the application compatible with as many terminals as possible. The idea is in particular to unclog emergency rooms by ensuring that everyone can correctly take their temperature and ensure that they have a fever or not before consulting, especially during a wave of flu or Covid-19 epidemic.