Development of a wireless health monitoring system for measuring core body temperature from the back of the body

In this paper, a user-friendly and low-cost wireless health monitoring system that measures skin temperature from the back of the body for monitoring the core body temperature is proposed. To measure skin temperature accurately, a semiconductor-based microtemperature sensor with a maximum accuracy of ±0.3°C was chosen and controlled by a high-performance/low-power consumption Acorn-Reduced Instruction Set Computing Machine (ARM) architecture microcontroller to build the temperature measuring device. Relying on a 2.4 GHz multichannel Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) RF communication technology, up to 100 proposed temperature measuring devices can transmit the data to one receiver at the same time. The shell of the proposed wireless temperature-measuring device was manufactured via a 3D printer, and the device was assembled to conduct the performance tests and in vivo experiments. The performance test was conducted with a K-Type temperature sensor in a temperature chamber to observe temperature measurement performance. The results showed an error value between two devices was less than 0.1°C from 25 to 40°C. For the in vivo experiments, the device was attached on the back of 10 younger male subjects to measure skin temperature to investigate the relationship with ear temperature. According to the experimental results, an algorithm based on the curve-fitting method was implemented in the proposed device to estimate the core body temperature by the measured skin temperature value. The algorithm was established as a linear model and set as a quadratic formula with an interpolant and with each coefficient for the equation set with 95% confidence bounds. For evaluating the goodness of fit, the sum of squares due to error (SSE), R-square, adjusted R-square, and root mean square error (RMSE) values were 33.0874, 0.0212, 0.0117, and 0.3998, respectively. As the experimental results have shown, the mean value for an error between ear temperature and estimated core body temperature is about ±0.19°C, and the mean bias is 0.05 ± 0.14°C when the subjects are in steady status.