Clinical Trial of Wireless Epidermal Temperature Sensors: preliminary results
Body temperature is one of the most effective biometric indicators revealing the health conditions of a person. Wireless wearable sensors may completely change the way the body temperature is collected, stored and hence processed. Very recently, the autho
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University of Roma Tor Vergata, Pervasive Electromagnetic Lab, Roma, IT 2 University of Roma Tor Vergata, Internal Medicine Division, Roma, IT
Abstract— Body temperature is one of the most effective biometric indicators revealing the health conditions of a person. Wireless wearable sensors may completely change the way the body temperature is collected, stored and hence processed. Very recently, the authors developed battery-less low cost wireless thermometers by using the paradigm of the emerging Epidermal Electronics technology. Such devices are suitable to placement over the skin like a plaster or a tattoo and are compatible with the UHF Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) standard. Their potential application in clinical usage is here discussed by the help of volunteers at the University Hospital of Roma Tor Vergata. The experimental study is aimed at understanding the robustness of the sensor output versus the measurement procedure, the positioning over different body parts and several patients. Early results of the on-going clinical trial revealed that the RFID sensors variance is comparable with that of tympanic thermometer. The required compensation offset resulted rather patient-specific and can even vary for a same user along different days. Nevertheless, the on-chest placement is likely to mitigate this uncertainty.e on-chest placement is likely to mitigate this uncertainty. Keywords— Radiofrequency Identification, Epidermal Electronics, Wearable temperature sensor.
tient’s skin, provided with an unique identification capability and with a wireless interaction with a reader device. The collected temperature, and the corresponding time-stamp, will be immediately available into the electronic medical chart of the patient, thus greatly reducing the manual effort of the nursing staff and the risk of mistakes. The technology driver enabling this new procedure is the Epidermal Electronics [1]: the authors have recently introduced [2] a new kind of wearable thermometer [2] compatible with the Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) standards. The device is fully passive, i.e. no local energy source (battery) is required as the onboard electronics is driven by a power harvesting module taking energy from the interrogation device. The thermometer accuracy was demonstrated to be less than 0.2 C and the time constant was τ < 5 s. This work aims at boosting the usability of such a new device in real clinical conditions. At this purpose, the paper now investigates the applicability of the epidermal temperature sensor concerning: i) the stability of the measurement with respect to the data acquisition modality (e.g. the way the RFID reader is put close to the body for data retrieval); ii) the precision of the measurement with respect to a state of the art clinical thermometer like the auricular device; iii) the sensitivity of the temperature measurement with respect to the body part of placement and to the human variability.
I. I NTRODUCTION II. T HE E PIDERMAL RFID T HERMOMETER Body temperature is among the most eff
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