A widely talked about smart technology during the Covid pandemic was a smart thermometer. Kinsa Health makes internet-connected thermometers that they employed to track coronavirus cases. Kinsa sold or gave away more than 1 million smart thermometers to households and recorded their temperatures. They then published aggregated and anonymized data from its smart thermometer ‘network’ across the US that identified a map of clusters of high temperatures, a possible indication of Covid-19 outbreaks.
Previously, Kinsa had used their aggregated tracking data to predict the spread of flu before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C) because C.D.C’s data was dependent on weekly reports from hundreds of emergency rooms and doctors’ offices whereas Kinsa used millions of data points in real-time. Their thermometers connect to an app that can instantly transmit the readings to the company. Large-scale use of this technology as a disease surveillance tool can track health patterns on a regional/national level.
