Forehead thermometers could be less accurate in Black patients, study warns

Chia-Yi Hou
·2 min read

Story at a glance

  • Taking temperatures is the main way health care providers determine if a patient has a fever.

  • Missing a possible fever could delay treatment.

  • A study of more than 4,000 patients finds that Black patients are less likely to get an accurate reading with a forehead thermometer than with an oral thermometer.

Forehead thermometers take temperatures using infrared radiation. Whether the devices can pick up the radiation can be affected by something called skin emissivity. Skin emissivity is how much light, radiation and heat is emitted by the skin and can be affected by skin pigmentation.

In a study from Emory University, researchers look at data from 2014 to 2021 for about 2,000 Black patients and 2,000 white patients. They had their temperatures taken by both forehead and oral thermometers within a short time span on their first day in the hospital. For Black patients, the chances of detecting a fever with a forehead thermometer was 26 percent lower than with an oral thermometer. There were no significant differences for white patients.

Missed fevers in Black patients can lead to delayed diagnosis and potentially increased risk of death down the line. “

If fevers are going undetected, then alerts are not being activated,” says Sivasubramanium Bhavani, who is the lead author on the study and an assistant professor at Emory, to NPR. “The differences in detection of fevers could lead to delays in antibiotics and medical care for Black patients.”

Health care professionals have also drawn attention to the racial biases in oximeters, used to measure blood oxygen levels especially during the pandemic. A study published in July in JAMA Internal Medicine found that in a study of pulse oximeters, “there were differences in supplemental oxygen administration between Asian, Black, and Hispanic patients and White patients that were associated with pulse oximeter performance and may contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in care.”

This thermometer study’s authors state that the errors could be due to not scanning people’s foreheads properly. In a previous study by a different research group, a small study of 65 individuals found that there were no differences in skin emissivity when comparing people grouped by skin pigmentation.

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