How much is your child’s comfort worth? What about your sanity?
I’m no parent, but based on what I’ve discovered speaking with a number of friends who are, using a traditional thermometer is a recipe for tears. And while there are non-invasive ways of acquiring that information, they are generally not as accurate.
Enter Withings’ Thermo, a connected thermometer that uses 16 sensors, a heat-sensitive skin detector, and WiFi access to, by the company’s account, convey a “highly-accurate temperate reading in only two seconds.”
To work, the Thermo needs to rest near a person’s temple, which, due to the natural cavity that forms underneath the skin, is the warmest part of a person’s head. Withings notes that Thermo is the most sanitary form of temperature-taking because it does not need to come into contact with saliva or ear wax, and can therefore be used with multiple people with little to no cleaning.
The upside to the $99 USD accessory is its ability to form profiles for individual family members through an app, and create a timeline of one’s rise and fall through fever, or the like. Parents can manually add actions like the ingestion of pain medicine to determine how long its takes to begin working. Withings is also pitching the app as a way to share this data with a general practitioner or paediatrician, though it’s unclear whether the doctor would need to have the Thermo app installed or if the data can be exported to another widely-shared format such as Microsoft Excel.
And while it is not particularly relevant to its function, the Thermo, like all of Withings’ products, is elegantly-designed. A green attachment clearly denotes which end is placed on the temple, and a small button on the inside lines up with a thumb groove to ensure it is comfortable to hold. Finally, a dot matrix-style LED display shows the most recent temperature reading.
Withings hasn’t said when the Thermo will be coming to Canada, nor its price when it does arrive, but expect it later this year for around $140-$150 CAD.
[source]Withings[/source]
