A Wearable Skin Temperature Monitoring System for Early Detection of Infections
Junjun Huan, Joshua S. Bernstein, Parker Difuntorum, Naren Vikram Raj Masna, Nikolaus Gravenstein, Swarup Bhunia, Soumyajit Mandal
Abstract
This paper describes a wearable, open-source wrist temperature monitoring system that enables the reliable identification of slowly-varying skin temperature patterns that may be indicative of infections. The hardware platform uses a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless interface and includes three skin temperature sensors, a thermally-isolated ambient temperature sensor, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a Galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor. A template-matching algorithm is used to detect weak but long-lived anomalous temperature patterns that deviate from the normal circadian rhythm are thus may be driven by infections. Experimental and simulation results confirm that small temperature anomalies (peak value <0.4°C) extending over 2–3 weeks can be detected with a total error rate <10%.