'Smart thermometers' track influenza season in real time

Kinsa, a maker of smart thermometers, says it is tracking this year's influenza season faster and in greater geographic detail than public health authorities can. This year's influenza season—which CDC rates as "moderately severe"—has left Missouri and Iowa the "sickest states in the country," according to Inder Singh, founder of Kinsahealth.com. The data offers a different picture from that of CDC, which on January 12 held a news conference to announce that flu activity was "widespread" across the continental United States. The CDC data comes from hospitals and clinics that report how many cases of influenza-like illness they treat, while Kinsa is able to almost instantly identify fever spikes in states through the more than 500,000 households that own its oral and ear thermometers that link to smartphones, explains Singh. He says the company receives about 25,000 readings daily. However, Kinsa is unable to measure hospitalizations, deaths, or which strains of influenza are circulating, or consistently differentiate influenza from other febrile illnesses. Kinsa, whose technology was approved by FDA in 2014, hopes to soon publish a study by external experts assessing its accuracy in measuring the seasonal influenza spread.