Skin-Attachable Sensor for Continuous Core Body Temperature Monitoring

This article presents an in vivo study on a skin-attachable core body thermometer. One of the biggest issues with skin-attachable sensors is lateral heat flow induced by convection, which results in overestimation of heat flow from the body. The proposed sensor has a unique aluminum structure to reduce lateral heat flow, which provides robustness against ambient convections. The ability of the sensor was verified in an in vitro study in our previous work. In the in vivo study reported here, core body temperature (CBT) measurements were performed under the conditions of fanning and light exercise. Although there were some transient and systematic errors at high blood flows or right after fanning, the sensor attached to the forehead showed good agreement with the reference tympanic temperature, with a correlation coefficient of 0.96 and an RMSE of 0.1 °C.