MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS

An electronic sticker to measure body temperature in a single second

  • SkinTemp and the Eurecat technology centre have designed an adhesive dressing to monitor the entire evolution of fever.

  • The dressing is designed as an alternative to traditional thermometers to measure body temperature in a more comfortable, fast and reliable way.

  • SkinTemp is patented to develop new versions of the product that will allow indicators such as glucose, heart rate and blood pressure to be measured.

Barcelona, 26th February, 2018.- The Catalan company SkinTemp and the technology center Eurecat will present at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona an adhesive dressing that is placed on the skin and allows to control body temperature with the smartphone in less than a second, in order to offer an alternative to traditional thermometers to measure fever in a more comfortable, fast and flexible way.

This new system, which can be seen at the Eurecat booth in MWC (Hall Congress Square. Booth CS20, number 41) “just requires sticking the dressing on the skin and passing the phone over it to know the exact body temperature”, which “eliminates the waiting time for temperature measurement and makes it possible to go from intervals of between thirty seconds and two minutes to only one second”, explains Ignacio Faura, founder of Skintemp.

As he points out, the device “offers maximum precision, with factory calibration for each device and provides comfort and a great saving of time that makes it especially useful in the case of babies, children and elderly people.

From a technological point of view, Skintemp “has patented its solution thanks to the use of Eurecat’s printed electronics”, says Santi Pérez, from the Eurecat team that has developed the device.

The new system, he adds, “uses NFC technology to establish communication between the sticker and the mobile phone, which processes information through an application and gives the option of viewing data in graphical or tabular form.

The application also allows to create alarms that help to control the time of illness fever, it can manage the temperature of several people at the same time and the data generated can be exported in different formats, such as email or mobile message. In this way, it is possible to give the doctor the evolution of the last hours, days or weeks and the recorded temperature peaks.

From concept to product

The product idea, which is the result of 14 months of conceptualization and development work, arose when one of SkinTemp’s three partners shared the problem of measuring their baby’s body temperature and saw that “there was no system that combined simplicity and efficiency, didn’t need Bluetooth or battery and was competitively priced and affordable for everyone,” says the founder of Skintemp.

The partners of the company, a Project Manager, a marketing specialist and an engineer with business experience, decided to bet on taking forward the initial idea with the technological help of Eurecat and within the framework of the +PiME initiative which aims to promote technology innovation projects for SMEs in the territory.

In the words of the president of Eurecat, Xavier Torra, Skintemp “reflects the accompaniment that the technology center gives to companies in the whole process that goes from the expression of an idea to its implementation in the market, adding innovation and cutting-edge technology to make it a reality”.

Skintemp has been designed for domestic, day care and geriatric use, but its technological simplicity gives it a capacity for modulation and adaptation that will allow it to be used in hospitals and health centres, as well as in social uses, as could be the case of refugee camps, in order to be able to prevent and quickly deal with epidemics of diseases where fever is a very clear symptom of contagion.

Currently SkinTemp works for body temperature, but the system is also patented to measure glucose, heart rate, blood pressure or oxygen saturation in the blood, among other indicators.