Fever Smart

When a mutual friend was diagnosed with cancer during their freshman year at Penn, William Duckworth and Aaron Goldstein wanted to help.

As their friend underwent chemotherapy, Duckworth and Goldstein noticed that he was growing increasingly frustrated by not being able to continuously monitor his temperature, which would often spike with no warning.

Out of that frustration came Fever Smart, a simple yet powerful medical device and cloud information system that addresses a problem faced in many areas of medicine: monitoring core body temperature over time.  The brainchild of Duckworth, a 2016 Engineering graduate, and Goldstein, a 2016 Wharton graduate, Fever Smart enables patients and healthcare providers to monitor a patient’s temperature in real time and receive alerts when their temperature begins to rise to unsafe levels.

Duckworth and Goldstein received the 2016 President’s Innovation Prize for their work with Fever Smart, a product that they hope will become the next big thing in remote healthcare monitoring.

Despite the proliferation of high-tech consumer devices that track vital statistics, something as simple as continuous temperature monitoring remained elusive until Duckworth and Goldstein began thinking about the problem.  Through a mix of market research, medical perspective, and personal experience, the pair arrived at what they call an “early warning system for the human body.”

“It is amazing that no one had come up with this before, but sometimes that’s the hallmark of a great idea,” says Matthew Grennan, an Assistant Professor of Healthcare Management at Wharton and the team’s faculty mentor.

The physical Fever Smart product is applied like a Band-Aid under a patient’s arm and wirelessly feeds temperature updates to a smartphone.  Its potential applications are endless.

“We have simple hardware that can be used in a hundred different ways, just by changing the software side of things,” Duckworth says.  “We have a customer in Australia who puts them in HVAC piping in the ceiling and figures out where he needs to increase the sizes of his pipe because air isn’t flowing.”

With the support of the President’s Innovation Prize, the team’s next big goal is to move Fever Smart from the home to the hospital.  “In the hospital,” Goldstein says, “a nurse comes in every hour or so to manually take a patient’s temperature.  So if you want continuous monitoring, you hire two more nurses and have them walk in and out of the patient’s room all day.”

“When we found that out,” Duckworth continues, “it seemed crazy to us.  We knew there was a bigger problem here.  It wasn’t just something that would be nice to have, it was something that was needed.  You could have each patient on a floor wearing a Fever Smart and have single nurse monitoring them all — that’s much more efficient.” 

In addition to placing their product inside hospitals, Duckworth and Goldstein are exploring potential markets in China, where Goldstein will spend the next year as a Schwarzman Scholar.

From their dorm rooms in the Quad to Beijing, the team credits a supportive environment at Penn for helping their idea grow and take shape.  

“We’ve found opportunities and resources in every corner of the University and made use of them all,” Goldstein says.  “If you have an idea like this, it’s up to you to make the most of it.”