Safety and Feasibility of Prima-Temp Thermometer Patch in Determining Baseline Temperatures of Research Subjects in a Hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU)

The manifestation of fever and its characteristics is essential to the care of intensive care unit patients. As a marker for infection or other disease process, the presence of a fever and its temperature peak must be reliably obtained in ICU patients and must be monitored closely to optimize effective therapy. Inherent variability of different temperature measurement methods can lead to a difficulty in determining the optimal timing of medical interventions. Ideally, nurses and medical staff in acute care hospital facilities could have a temperature monitoring system that aids recognition of fever and systemic infection that is not labor intensive and provides consistent and reliable temperatures. Automatic transmission to a data recorder lessens the chances of manual entry error into the medical record. Frequent measurements allow establishment of a patient's individual baseline temperature to provide individualized guidelines for medical interventions with an increase of 2°F above baseline as documentation of a fever. Finally, the frequent temperature monitoring should be minimally invasive and comfortable to the patient.