Core Body Temperature for Research

Why monitor core body temperature for your research applications?

• Core Body Temperature is a vital parameter for monitoring an individual’s health status and refers to the body’s organs’ temperature. It fluctuates following physiological processes, such as physical activity, circadian and ovulation rhythm, or various illnesses and sleeping disorders.

• Before CALERA®, it was only possible to accurately monitor the core temperature in study participants using invasive methods such as uncomfortable rectal thermometers or expensive ingestible pills. The non-invasive CALERA® Research makes monitoring of the core temperature straightforward and manageable.

• Other devices on the market try to estimate core body temperature via skin surface temperature. Due to the complexity of thermal regulation and the thermal influences from changing environmental conditions and physical activity, this estimate does not come close to CALERA’s accuracy and reliability.

• What about in-ear (tympanic) and oral thermometers? These methods can provide accurate results during stable conditions like in a hospital bed. But these single-point measurements do not provide much information. The continuous temperature signal of CALERA® will give much better insights.

Why choose CALERA® Research for your study?

As mentioned above, the CALERA® technology is Accurate, Continuous & Non-invasive. We have integrated calera into CALERA® Research and CORE. Both of these devices have the same hardware. But CALERA® Research comes with services and functionalities that are designed specifically for researchers. CALERA® Research is also compatible with all apps & tools developed for CORE.

Research Functionalities and Services of CALERA® Research

For scientific studies, we recommend the use of CALERA® Research as it offers the following beneficial functionalities and services.

• Raw Data Access

  • 1 Hz resolution
  • Core temp, Skin temp, Acceleration XZY, heart rate, and Heat-flux ⁽¹⁾
  • Run future algorithms on previously collected data

• Remote Support

  • Assist before and during the study
  • Interpretation of data
  • IRB support
  • Check study proposal

• Best Accuracy

  • Individually calibrated devices

• Store Data on CALERA® Research

  • No loss in data due to bad connection

• PC / Mac Tool

  • Control multiple devices
  • Faster data download

CALERA® Research can be used in regular mode or logging mode. In regular mode, it will behave like a CORE and upload core temp, skin temp, and heart rate (from an external device) with a 5-min resolution to cloud.corebodytemp.com. When using the logging mode, the raw data is saved locally on the device. All raw data is measured once per second, except for the core temperature, which is calculated every minute. The heat-flux sensor measures the amount of thermal energy that passes through the device and is the cornerstone of our technology.
 

⁽¹⁾ We can enable access to the heat-flux data after signing an agreement.
 

Only CALERA® Research software allows to control multiple devices simultaneously. This tool is available for PC and Mac. Especially during large studies, we strongly recommend using this PC software instead of phone apps.
 

CALERA® Research applications

Core body temperature is an important vital sign. However, before CALERA, it was often impractical to measure the core temperature. Pulmonary artery catheters, urinary bladder, or oesophageal are only used in a medical setting because otherwise, the risks are too high. Rectal thermometers are often not preferred by participants, and ingestible thermometer e-pills are expensive and need the right timing. All other methods should not be used for scientific studies. A continuous core body temperature signal has countless applications, and we are working together with many partners and researchers in the fields below.

• Physiology
• Sports
• Fever & Sepsis detection
• Medical studies
• Drug & Vaccine Testing
• Ovarian Cycle
• Thermal Comfort
• Circadian Cycle
  • Sleep Disorders
  • Stress
  • Obesity
  • Alzheimer
  • Parkinson

CALERA® Research received the Emergency Use Authorization in the US, making it available for clinical use during the Covid-19 crisis. We are currently filing for full FDA approval.

The bias explains how precise a method is, meaning that the average of all measurements is close to the true measurement, but the spread of the error can still be significant. A better indication of the accuracy is the 95 % Limit of Agreement. This value shows that 95% of all measurements fall within this range from the bias. In the following chart, we show different thermometer types with respect to Limits of Agreement and include the CORE sensor data from the Verdel et al. study and greenteg’s internal study. Again, all points follow from measurements during sports and use a rectal thermometer as a reference, except our internal validation, which uses gastrointestinal pills.
 

Casa et al. (2007) work does not present a cut-off value for the limits of agreement, but Mogensen et al. [3] found that the limit of agreement from one of the best tympanic (in-ear) thermometer used in a medical environment is 0.8°C. ^[1,3] All values below this line should be considered highly accurate. Based on the data available, both from us and Verdel et al., CALERA® Research is the most accurate non-invasive method for core body temperature measurements. (95% LoA CORE: Internal study 0.56°C, Verdel et al. 0.55°C and 0.61°C respectively).^[2]
 

For more information about CALERA® Research and its validation, please download the CALERA® Research guide below.

In addition, a comparison of tympanic with core body temperature in stroke patients was performed by Ajčević et al. (2022) and reported in the Sensors journal. This work highlights the potential of core body temperature monitoring performed with greenteg’s technology as a method to track reliably stroke patients body temperature compared to standard temperature measurements. ^[4] Find out more here.