Development of a non-contact clinical thermometer for hospitals and "at home" telehealth using NBIoT, BLE and WiFi communication platforms

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The project will develop, test and demonstrate how patient vital-sign data can be readily collected in real-time, automatically uploaded to electronic patient record databases and subsequently made available to clinical staff for review and analysis irrespective of their location. **Having this capability with a standalone, handheld device in the current Covid-19 crisis would be invaluable.**Non-contact, standalone, connected, clinical-grade thermometers will enable the nurse to measure a patient's temperature, and then the patient data sent via wireless communications to a network server, where the data will be used to update the patient's personal record in the central electronic medical record database (EMR). Having this information centrally stored on an electronic server will enable local and remote access of information by clinical and nursing staff caring for the patient.Temperature is one of the key vital signs used by medical staff in the diagnosing and monitoring of a patient's state of health. Clinically it is measured often and changing trends are closely monitored, but it can expose the patient to possible infections, and where manual recording of data is required, can be wasteful of nurses' time and open to transcription errors. A non-contact, connected, clinical thermometer addresses these current concerns, and offers up a number of key-enablers for wider and better patient care.**Key benefits can be summarised as:**• **Reduced risk of infections and patient discomfort/anxiety** -- NON-CONTACT device• **Lower costs -- no consumables** -- NON-CONTACT no touching of patient - and therefore no need for the disposable plastic sheaths as used with contact thermometers,• **Ready access to up-to-date patient data locally and remote** - CONNECTED• **Time savings for nurses** - no need for manual input of data or paper records, and reduced transcription errors.A key objective of the project will involve trials to demonstrate the real time collection, uploading/storing, and analysis of the temperatures of several different population groups, to include hospital patients and groups within the wider community, using the new innovative thermometer.The new device will build upon the existing non-connected TriTemp thermometer which has been clinically approved, and is currently used in many hospitals worldwide. A key outcome of the project will be to produce a set of devices suitable for the use-case validation trials in a clinical context.