Frequently Asked Questions
Feverprints is a research app for your iPhone designed to study temperature variation in health and disease. We seek to recruit thousands of children and adults from across the United States for the largest research study of body temperature ever created. With the data from this study, we hope to improve our ability to determine the cause of fevers.
By joining this study, you and thousands others from all walks of life will enhance our understanding of temperatures. We hope that this information will allow doctors to make faster and more accurate diagnoses. We will also gain a better understanding of "normal" and "febrile" temperatures in individuals of different races, sexes, ages, and sizes. Finally, we hope to learn how different fever medications affect your symptoms and the course of a disease.
You can download the Feverprints app from Apple's App Store. You will then learn more about the study and provide consent to participate.
Feverprints is a free app, and there is no cost to participating in this study.
The Feverprints app will ask you to regularly measure and record your temperature, as well as and respond to surveys about your health. You can measure your temperature as often as you wish, and you can skip answering any question.
Any child or adult living in the United States who can understand English and has access to a thermometer can join the study. Children under 18 years of age will need parental permission.
You will need to have an iPhone 5, iPhone 6, or the latest generation of the iPod Touch. You will also need to own a thermometer.
Any kind of thermometer will do! If you have a regular thermometer, we will ask you to measure your temperature and then enter it into the app. If you have a "smart" thermometer that connects to your iPhone, you will be able to automatically upload your temperature.
Unfortunately no. This study is only available through Apple's ResearchKit framework, which allows researchers to conduct medical research by developing apps such as Feverprints. This capability is only available through Apple's iOS at this time.
The Feverprints app will ask you short surveys that will include questions about your medical history, diagnoses, medication usage, lifestyle, drug use, ancestry, and family history. We will also ask you to log your temperatures and record any associated symptoms.
Your data will be sent to a secure database, and all of the information collected will be anonymous, meaning that the researchers doing the study won't know who you are. Your personal information such as name and email address will never leave your phone. Each participant is only identified by a random ID generated by the phone.
At this time, only one person can participate per iPhone. If several members of a family wish to join the study, they will each require to use a seperate iPhone or iPod Touch.
Your anonymous data, along with that of other participants, will be analyzed together to improve our understanding of normal and abnormal temperatures, identify illnesses based on their "feverprints," and evaluate the effect of fever medications on the underlying disease. Individual participants will never be identified. We plan to present the results of this study in various medical conferences, as well as to publish our results in various medical journals. You will be able to learn about our progress from this website.
We will ask you to answer a health survey when you join the study, which will take 5-10 minutes. Every week we will ask you to regularly measure your temperature and symptoms at least once per week, although you can do this more or less frequently, as you see fit. This should only take a minute or two. We may ask you to answer additional surveys in the future.
We will ask questions about your health, your family's health, general well-being, medications, and ancestry. We will also ask you to record your symptoms when you're having a fever.
You may withdraw your consent and discontinue participating at any time.
Someone may be able to see your answers from your iPhone. Some of the data that you provide may be sensitive. For this reason, we never send your name, address, or birthday to our computers. You are only identified by a random number.
No. The data we collect will only be used for research purposes per your consent.
