January 14, 2015
A University of Pennsylvania Wharton School student has been named 2014 “College Entrepreneur of the Year” by Entrepreneur magazine for his invention of a smart thermometer that monitors a person’s body temperature in real time and reports it to a smartphone.
Junior Aaron Goldstein, founder and CEO of Fever Smart, explained how the device works in his YouTube video entry application to Entrepreneur, for which he was awarded a $5,000 prize.
The wearable device has a computer chip in an adhesive bandage, which, says Goldstein, can help parents keep tabs on a sick child’s fever.
“You can use the Fever Smart device to monitor their temperature remotely at night,” he explains. “And you can get an alert on your smartphone if their temperature starts to rise, and that way you’ll know to intervene.”
Aside from easing the worries of parents by monitoring their sick child’s temperature, other possibilities for the device include monitoring athletes and active service military members to prevent heat stroke and help women who are trying to conceive since a spike in resting temperature is associated with ovulation.
Goldstein, 20, of West Palm Beach, Fla., told the magazine that he and his classmate Colin Hill, also a Penn junior, dreamt up the invention with Hill in mind, as he was undergoing chemotherapy to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the time, which meant constant monitoring of his temperature to make sure he didn’t come down with infections while his immune system was compromised.
Hill is the chief marketing officer of Fever Smart. They raised $63,000 through a crowdfunding website to manufacture the device.
Once it was created, the pair decided to target parents as opposed to cancer patients.
“From a business marketing perspective, trying to create something for chemotherapy patients is probably not the best opportunity for our first target market,” Goldstein said.
