From the basic rectal or oral to the connected contactless, the thermometer is one of the essentials of the first aid kit. Not all of them are equally practical or accurate, which is why we rate them to help you choose the right one for you.
Body temperature is a vital indicator, indicating possible illness or infection when it rises above normal (35.9°C to 38.2°C rectally, depending on the age of the people). In order to detect and monitor this feverish state, it is advisable to use a reliable and precise medical thermometer, but also practical enough not to cause handling or interpretation errors when taking the temperature.
If the traditional thermometer – most often electronic now – is supposed to offer the most reliable results, its use in rectal or even oral can be restrictive. This is why infrared thermometers are increasingly popular.
Whether they are auricular (tympanic) or frontal (temporal), they constitute as many more or less practical and precise possibilities, but impose a few precautions for use in order to deliver fairly reliable values.
In this context, it is difficult to choose a thermometer that offers satisfaction just by reading the descriptions of manufacturers and retailers. That’s why we decided to evaluate them in order to help you make the right choice.
To assess the accuracy of the measurements, we use a professional medical thermometer, the Welch Allyn SureTemp Plus 692. This gives us the reference temperatures for 8 series of rectal measurements spaced 10 minutes apart, while we vary our temperature bodily (ingestion of cold water and feet immersed in a basin of ice water).
We also evaluate the repeatability of the measurements, in order to observe whether the thermometer tested always measures the same temperature during successive shots, with an ideal positioning at first, then voluntarily perfectible to analyze the impact of human error.
Although we carefully read the instructions for use of each thermometer before use — its simplicity of understanding being taken into account — these different measurements also allow us to evaluate the convenience of use, in addition to a point-by-point evaluation. of each thermometer: start-up time, time between each measurement, general ease of handling, readability of measurements, access to batteries, etc.