Development of a Novel Scheme for Long-Term Body Temperature Monitoring: A Review of Benefits and Applications

Abstract

Body temperature is a health or disease marker that has been in clinical use for centuries. The threshold currently applied to define fever, with small variations, is 38 • C. However, current approaches do not provide a full picture of the thermoregulation process and its correlation with disease.This paper describes a new non-invasive body temperature device that improves the understanding of the pathophysiology of diseases by integrating a variety of temperature data from different body locations. This device enables to gain a deeper insight into fever, endogenous rhythms, subject activity and ambient temperature to provide anticipatory and more efficient treatments. Its clinical use would be a big step in the overcoming of the anachronistic febrile/afebrile dichotomy and walking towards a system medicine approach to certain diseases.This device has already been used in some clinical applications successfully. Other possible applications based on the device features and clinical requirements are also described in this paper.

Fever Time Series Analysis Using Slope Entropy. Application to Early Unobtrusive Differential Diagnosis

“…Although the infra-red clinical temperature measuring technology is very convenient in terms of non-obtrusiveness and lack of contact (distance), in its current form it is certainly not more than a plain fever/no fever assessment tool [ 2 ]. It still overlooks the richer physiological information yielded by the output of the thermo-regulatory system that can be obtained from a temporal continuum perspective instead, even before fever is present [ 3 ].…”

Mean core to peripheral temperature difference and mean lactate levels in first 6 hours of hospitalisation as two indicators of prognosis: an observational cohort study

“…In 2015 Cuesta-Frau and colleagues developed a novel device capable of monitoring and recording the core to peripheral temperature difference every 30 s [13]. We postulate that high frequency recording of temperature and temperature difference as described by Cuesta-Frau (referred to as 'continuous recording of temperature' in this article) may be more useful in predicting mortality than the intermittent readings utilised by Houwink and colleagues [12] as it affords much greater granularity of data.…”

The Difference in Body Temperature Measured on the Tympanic Membrane, in the Axilla and with Infrared Sensor Thermometer in Pulmonary Intensive Care Patients

“…While taking the body temperature, we want to measure the core body temperature (5), and in patients in intensive care units this most often involves insertion of a catheter in the pulmonary artery (5). Other invasive methods of measuring the body temperature include measuring the temperature in the esophagus, urinary bladder, large intestine, while methods used more frequently are non-invasive methods such as measuring the temperature orally, in the axilla, on the tympanic membrane (5,6) and with an infrared sensor thermometer on the patient's forehead.…”