Infrared Ear Thermometers Do Not Accurately Measure Core Temperature in Fire Fighters During Recovery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fire fighters must work maximally in many different environmental conditions (i.e. extreme heat) and, because of their protective gear, are at greater risk for thermal illness and injury than most occupations. Rehabilitation tents at fire and rescue sites allow ambulance personnel to monitor fire fighter vital signs to ensure that it is safe for the fire fighters to continue work. Many fire departments rely on infrared ear thermometers to indicate core body temperature however the accuracy of this instrument in these settings has not been determined. PURPOSE: To compare infrared ear thermometers (Te) to intra-abdominal thermometers (Tc) as a valid assessment of core body temperature in fire fighters following emergency training scenarios in different ambient temperatures. METHODS: 45 Firefighters from the Victoria Fire Department volunteered for the study. Te was measured using an infrared ear thermometer and Tc was measured using an ingested telemetry pill and data monitoring system. The subjects participated in live fire and auto extrication scenarios at three different times of the year, during cold (C) at0 & −1oC, mild (M) 8oC, and Warm (W) 27&33oC temperatures. After completion of a scenario all subjects removed their protective gear and passively cooled in an upright seated position. After the live fire scenarios, Tc and Te measurements were taken immediately after removal of gear, and after 5 and 10 minutes of recovery. In the auto extrication scenarios, Tc and Te were sampled immediately, and after 15, 30, and 45 minutes of recovery. RESULTS: In all scenarios, Te underestimated Tc regardless of recovery time interval or ambient temperature. During recovery from live fire in condition C, Te underestimated Tc by 0.46-1.44 oC (p<0.05). In M condition Te underestimated Tc by 0.7-1.83 oC (p<0.01) and in the W condition Te underestimated Tc by 0.42-1.08 oC (p<0.01). During the auto extrication trials Te underestimated Tc by a range of 0.8-1.22 oC (p<0.01) except at the 30 min. mark of recovery. The biggest discrepancy between Te and Tc were observed during the 5–15 min time periods of recovery during all trials. CONCLUSION: Infrared Ear thermometers are not an accurate predictor of core body temperature at any time up to 45 minutes following firefighter related work in any temperature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".