Problem:
A regular thermometer will beep to tell you that it is done taking your temperature. This is a problem for the deaf who in order to know it was done, would have to stare at the display and look for when the temperature stays constant. This would cause the person to go cross eyed and be highly unrealistic. Furthermore, impatient people are often tempted to take the thermometer out of their mouth early to make sure that it is working as it can sometimes feel like it’s taking forever to take a temperature. Other than the a fore-mentioned cross-eyed staring at numbers, this person has no idea how close the thermometer is to being done.
Proposed Solution:
In order to give more feedback to everyone and allow deaf people to easily know that the thermometer is done taking their temperature, I propose a thermometer that has an RGB LED attached to it at about eye level. This device would be red when they first put the thermometer in their mouth, turn yellow as the temperature got closer to leveling out, and finally turn green when the temperature was found. The colors would clearly show both when to take the thermometer out of the mouth and what stage it was at solving the problem for both deaf and impatient people.
Proof of concept:
In this demo video, I used a thermistor to represent the thermometer temperature sensor and my fingers to represent the temperature of my body. This is not a super accurate way to measure temperature, so I made the acceptable temperature ranges for it being done bigger than it would be for a real thermometer.
A quick video demonstration for my proof of concept:
One note for others: If your phone has a good camera and you have it default to the best setting, make sure to change it to a much worse one for these proof of concept videos as the file will be huge and take forever to get saved to drive and won’t be uploadable as the max is 16MB.
