Wearable Continuous Body Temperature Measurement Using Multiple Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

Continuous body temperature measurement (CBTM) is of great significance for human health state monitoring. To avoid interfering with users' daily activities, CBTM is usually achieved using wearable noninvasive thermometers. Current wearable noninvasive thermometers employ steady-state models used in nonwearable thermometers; as a result, the reaction time is long and the measurement can be disturbed by users' activities. However, there is no work to solve these issues. In this paper, first, differences between wearable and nonwearable temperature measurement are analyzed. Second, the relationship among the human body temperature, the skin temperature, and the device temperature is modeled based on artificial neural networks (ANNs). Third, this paper proposes a novel multiple ANNs-based wearable CBTM method. Experiments show that the reaction time of the proposed method is about one-tenth of that of other popular wearable noninvasive CBTM methods, while the accuracy and the robustness are improved.