Before the outbreak of coronavirus, the seasonal flu was one of the most dangerous infectious diseases, but a lot of people have trouble telling the difference between a flu and a cold by their symptoms alone. This gave [M. Bindhammer] the idea to design a smart thermometer that can distinguish between flu and cold.
Automated medical diagnostics is certainly an important technology of the future. [M. Bindhammer]’s project, named F°LUEX, is the second version of his iF°EVE thermometer. After taking the body temperature it asks the patient a set of questions about his symptoms and then calculates the probability of whether it is more likely to be a flu or a cold. [M. Bindhammer] uses a method commonly used in medical diagnostics based on Bayesian statistics which assigns a probability score to both hypotheses. It takes into account how often a certain symptom occurs when you have a common cold or flu as well as the overall probability of catching one or the other.
The hardware of the project is based on a custom PCB that includes a medical-grade MLX90614 infrared thermometer with an accuracy of ±0.2˚C around the human body temperature. The sensor is being read out by a Teensy 3.2 and information is displayed on a small OLED screen. Everything is housed in a 3D printed enclosure that received a nice finishing by painting with primer and acrylic spray paint. Unfortunately, [M. Bindhammer] project also got delayed by the corona crisis as his order for the temperature sensor got canceled due to the current high demand. But that does make us wonder ..
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