New York City is slated to begin utilizing smart thermometers to get ahead of the next outbreak before it occurs.
To do this, the city will gather data from thousands of smart thermometers that could detect an anomaly in the number of people developing fevers.
The company behind the smart thermometers, California-based startup Kinsa, says these internet-connected devices will provide city officials with health data that will aid in disease tracking.
In the end, the goal is to develop an early warning system that alerts officials to outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19 and the flu.
“One of the critical lessons that we have learned during the Covid epidemic is how important it is to have as accurate information as we can possibly get, in real time, about how diseases spread through communities,” said Dr. Jay Varma, senior adviser for public health to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Kinsa will provide up to 100,000 internet-connected thermometers to New York City’s elementary schools free of charge over the next few months. The distribution of these devices will begin with the areas that were the hardest hit with COVID-19.
All readings that are taken on a Kinsa device will then be sent to the accompanying Kinsa app. The app will also ask users about any other symptoms they may be having.
If there are any recommended next steps in a patient’s healthcare journey, the app will provide guidance.
In order to pass this information along to local health officials, Kinsa will anonymize the data. From there, aggregated data will be made available to city health officials to aid in identifying clusters of illness that is deemed unusual.
Additionally, schools and families will have access to their local school’s information based on trends at the grade level.
"We're aggregating data to be able to do outbreak detection down to the level of New York's 42 neighborhoods," said founder and CEO of Kinsa Inder Singh.
Officials hope this will help in curbing a new outbreak quickly — before large numbers of people show up and overwhelm hospitals for care.