Boston Children’s Hospital unveils its second ResearchKit app – Feverprints

Feverprints

The Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA) and Autoinflammatory Diseases Clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital is launching a ResearchKit app called Feverprints, which aims to answer a rather fundamental question in medicine: What, exactly, is a fever?

The application will gather personal information about body temperature, lifestyle and health from U.S. adults and children with parental consent. Feverprints will regularly remind users to record their temperature and answer questions about their symptoms, medications, lifestyle and health. The data will be anonymized and logged to a secure server.

Although fever is one of the most common signs of infection, it can also indicate the presence of other medical conditions, such as autoimmune and auto-inflammatory diseases. While a body temperature of 98.6°F (37°C) is generally considered “normal,” it does not account for temperature differences between individuals, so better understanding of temperature variations could allow doctors to provide better medical care.

Led by Fatma Dedeoglu, MD, director of the Autoinflammatory Diseases Clinic, and Boston Children’s rheumatologist Jonathan Hausmann, MD — the team will mine the submitted data to define unique patterns of temperature, so called “feverprints,” that may help clinicians diagnose infections and other diseases more quickly and accurately. In addition, the team will examine how effectively fever-reducing medicines work to reduce temperature in real-world use

“We want to help create a better understanding of the normal temperature variations throughout the day, to learn to use fever as a tool to improve medical diagnosis, and to evaluate the effect of fever medications on symptoms and disease course,” Jared Hawkins, MMSc, PhD, the director of informatics for IDHA, a member of Boson Children’s Computational Health Informatics Program, and the Feverprints team member, said in a statement. “By using ResearchKit to bring this study to iPhone, we’re able to gather more data about body temperature patterns than ever before possible.”

Last year, Boston Children’s Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) launched C Tracker, a ResearchKit app that aims to study chronic hepatitis C. That app allows users to track their health, medication use, and quality of life.