Advertisement

Use Feverprints to better understand your body temperature

Apple's ResearchKit is fueling the study of human body temps.

The Apple Health app will autonomously track your steps and other wellness data, sure, but Boston Children's Hospital wants its iOS app Feverprints to help you keep an eye on something else throughout the day: your temperature. What Feverprints hopes to achieve by using vast amounts of anonymized data is gaining a better idea of what the normal range of temperatures for a human is, at different times through the day. This could eventually lead to better care and diagnoses of fevers. Simply judging your readings against the standard 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and calling it good doesn't quite cut it when that temperature isn't the baseline for everyone.

"We want to help create a better understanding of the normal temperature variations throughout the day, to learn to use fever as a tool to improve medical diagnosis, and to evaluate the effect of fever medications on symptoms and disease course," project lead Jared Hawkins says in a prepared statement.

But the app won't do everything for you. You'll still have to log your temperature multiple times per day, but Feverprints will remind you to do so, and will anonymize your data. By collecting enough temperature data, the team says that defining "unique patterns of temperature" could aid in diagnosing infections or seeing how effective that gross syrup you just choked down was. Want to get started? Download the app and grab a thermometer -- some things still need to be done the old fashioned way.