Boston Children’s Hospital wants your help with a ResearchKit project to measure body temps

While most people know that normal body temperature is 98.6F/37C, your actual temperature can vary quite a bit during the course of a day, and that can make diagnosing fevers trickier than it might seem. To help get more accurate baseline data, the Boston Children’s Hospital wants your help in logging temperature data across a day.

Fever is one of the most common signs of illness and causes anxiety to many. Doctors still struggle with determining the cause of a fever. In addition, “normal” and “febrile” temperatures vary between individuals.

Better understandings of how body temperature varies between individuals and identification of disease fever patterns (“feverprints”) could allow doctors to make faster, more accurate diagnoses.

The Feverprints app uses the ResearchKit framework to collect the data. The app of course has no way to measure your temperature, so you’ll need to do that manually, though there are inexpensive Bluetooth thermometers available to make the job a little easier.

Apple recently launched a new CareKit framework, which provides patients with health data they can share with their physicians and carers.

Via Gizmodo