Pop-Up Medical Thermometer Woes

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

A follow-up look at a promising technology, ten years on
by Stephen Drew, AIR staff

The pop-up medical thermometer is still in regulatory limbo -- it has yet to see its first trials on
human beings. The thermometer was touted a decade ago as an impressively simple tool that will push medical expenses down and speed patients up out of their hospital beds.

More than a decade after it was invented, the device has yet to overcome the regulatory hurdles that confront even the simplest new kinds of healing technology.

Background: The Invention, Then the Delay
The January/February issue of the Annals of Improbable Research carried a report about the invention, describing its prospects help heal the debilitated healthcare delivery landscape in the U.S. and many other countries.

The pop-up medical thermometer is inserted into the skin or into an existing body aperture of a
hospitalized ill person. The inner cylinder pops up when the patient’s fever subsides, indicating that it is time for the patient to go home.

The technology was originally developed for the poultry industry. This is its first application to
biomedicine.

Long-term nursing facilities have been wanting a cheap, simple way to tell when a patient is healthy enough to be discharged. Some patients are often kept in bed for days or weeks longer than necessary. This new type of thermometer, which can be manufactured in bulk for less than two cents per unit, could save billions of dollars annually in unnecessary medical care expenses.

Early Problem Identified and Fixed
Early  prototypes  of  the  pop-up  thermometer  occasionally  caused  infections,  when  implanted transcutaneously in the belly. The problem did not arise when the device was used rectally.

These infections occurred in trials conducted on animal carcasses, specifically on chickens and
turkeys obtained from commercial meat wholesale companies and supermarkets. In almost every
case, the infection disappeared upon treatment with a simple therapy, oven roasting.

(Image credit: Flickr user churl han)

Continuing Hurdles
Because the necessary regulatory permission has not been granted by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, the pop-up medical thermometer has yet to be tested on live human beings. Until and unless medical regulators approve the trials, prospects in patient use appear discouragingly dim. The thermometer has not been -- and will not be -- tested on live chickens, because of the inventor’s concern for the animals’ welfare.

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This article is republished with permission from the September-October 2005 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.

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