Smart Design for …. Thermometers?
This past Sunday morning I woke up and couldn’t open my eyes. I also couldn’t go back to sleep, so this was a problem I had to deal with. I knew, after finally prying my eyelids open and feeling the burning in my left eye, that I had pink eye.
I went to a local emergent care place (I will trust them to treat anything that I already know I have, but not to diagnose anything new) and was rewarded with some nice eye drops. When the nurse was taking my vitals, she ran this tube-like device over my forehead and then wrote something down on her chart. I asked her what she did, and she told me she just took my temperature with that device, which measures heat emitted from the temporal artery in your forehead. I was amazed, especially since the device only contacted my forehead for about 1 second.
This is the first I had ever experienced or heard of such a device, but it turns out you can get one on Amazon
I wondered how accurate this is, but thought that this could be revolutionary for taking a child’s temperature – no more sitting on the couch for 5+ minutes with a glass tube shoved under your tongue, or even the 30 seconds or so for the digital version of the glass tube under the tongue. It turns out that it is considered at least more accurate than ear thermometers.
A recent BusinessWeek article highlights the design efforts that are currently focused on this narrow but obviously near-ubiquitous vertical product market. The article does not mention the device that I experienced, but shows that thermometer design can be a serious and lucrative business.
Technorati Tags: design, thermometer, medicine
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