Boston Children’s Hospital on Tuesday launched the Feverprints Apple ResearchKit app for the iPhone. The app will help researchers answer questions about fever by crowdsourcing personal information about body temperature, lifestyle and health.
"Many factors come together to set an individual's 'normal' temperature, such as age, size, time of day and maybe even ancestry," Jared Hawkins, the director of informatics for Boston Children’s Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator, said in a statement. "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.”
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Open to adults and children with parental consent, the app will regularly remind users to record their temperature and answer questions about their symptoms, medications, lifestyle and health. The data will be anonymized and logged in a secure database.
Fatma Dedeoglu, MD, director of the Autoinflammatory Diseases Clinic, and Boston Children's rheumatologist Jonathan Hausmann, MD, will lead the team that mines the submitted data to refine the range of body temperatures.
They will also use the data to define unique patterns of temperature, or "feverprints”, that could help clinicians diagnose infections and other diseases more quickly and accurately.
The team will also examine how effectively fever-reducing medicines work to reduce temperature.
Feverprints, free and available for download in Apple’s App Store, is Boston Children’s second ResearchKit app. The first, C-Tracker, was launched in 2015 to gather information about the real-world impacts of hepatitis C and drive improvements in treatment.
Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com
