Comparison / Our thermometer tests January 2023

From the basic rectal or oral to the non-contact device, a thermometer is a staple of your first aid kit. Not all of them are equally practical or accurate, which is why we’re evaluating them to help you choose the right one for you.

Body temperature is a vital indicator, indicating possible disease or infection when it rises above the normal range (35.9°C to 38.2°C rectally, depending on the person’s age). In order to detect and monitor this feverish condition, it is advisable to use a medical thermometer that is accurate and reliable, but also practical enough not to cause errors in handling or interpretation when taking temperature.

If a conventional thermometer—now often electronic—is supposed to provide the most reliable results, using it in the rectum or even the mouth can be limiting. This is why infrared thermometers are becoming increasingly popular.

Whether auricular (tympanic) or anterior (temporal), they constitute several more or less accurate and practical possibilities, but they impose some precautions for their use in order to provide more or less reliable values.

In this context, it is difficult to choose a thermometer that will provide satisfaction simply by reading the manufacturers and retailers’ descriptions. That’s why we decided to evaluate them to help you make the right choice.

To assess the accuracy of the measurements, we use a professional medical thermometer, Welch Allyn SureTemp Plus 692. This gives us the reference temperatures for 8 series of rectal measurements spaced 10 minutes apart, while we alter body temperature (swallowing cold water and feet immersed in a tub of ice water) .

We also evaluate the repeatability of the measurements, in order to observe whether the tested thermometer always measures the same temperature during successive shots, with a perfect position at the beginning, and then can be voluntarily mastered to analyze the impact of human error.

Although we carefully read the instructions for use of each thermometer before use – their simplicity of understanding is taken into account – these different measurements also allow us to evaluate the ease of use, as well as a point-by-point evaluation of each thermometer. : start time, time between each measurement, general ease of handling, reading measurements, access to batteries, etc.