This New App Turns Your Smartphone Into A Thermometer: How It Works – News18

What if we tell you that you don’t need an iPhone or any other expensive phone to use some of the main health features? Yes, there is an app now that can convert any phone into a thermometer. The researchers from the University of Washington have developed the app which they are calling FeverPhone.

The market already has a slew of wearables like the Apple Watch which has the feature but it doesn’t come cheap, which means the tech is limited to the premium audience. But having an app which can read body temperature means anybody with a smartphone can simply download it and use the feature. The best thing about the app is that you don’t need any special accessory to make the feature work.

The researchers say the phones already have a tech that helps them unlock the features of a thermometer. The device has a sensor called thermistor which is used to measure the temperature of the phone and the battery to avoid overheating. But how did they make use of the sensor to check body temperature? They tested it with a plastic bag filled with water that came in contact with the touchscreen of various phones.

The researchers used this data to train their machine learning model which helped them develop the FeverPhone app. But the work doesn’t end there. You have to place the phone’s screen at specific points for the app’s sensor to read the temperature. The phone has to be held on the forehead for around 90 seconds for best results. Once the app was ready for testing, it was used by 37 participants and the temperature with the accuracy close to the actual thing.

Since the app is still going through internal tests, we can’t say if it will get a public release anytime soon. And even if it does, surely the researchers would need approvals from health bodies to make it a recognised unit in the market that even medical professionals can vouch for and help people with treatment based on its assessment.