It is important to understand that your basal body temperature, your body’s lowest temperature during a 24 hour period, usually occurs while you are sleeping at night. Your temperature will begin to increase the moment you wake up and will continue to rise until the end of the day. Also, the little things you do will produce slight fluctuations in body temperature throughout the day.

A few factors that affect your body temperature are the temperature outside, your level of activity, your emotional and psychological status, eating, drinking and talking.

Because eating is directly connected to your metabolism, it can have a strong affect on your body temperature. A variance of up to 2⁰F is typical during the digestive process, and you cannot get an accurate picture of your body’s temperature if you take it around meal times.

It is important to keep all of these factors in mind before you take your temperature. If a reading seems unusually high or unusually low, don’t jump immediately to a panicked state. It is possible that your abnormal temperature could be caused by of any combination of these and other factors.

Because so many factors affect your body temperature, it is a good idea to take your temperature often while healthy. This will give you a better sense of your normal body temperature and give you a base to work from when you fear that you have an abnormal temperature. It is also a good idea to do this for your child to avoid unnecessary temperature scares in the future.

One night I called my mom in a panic, sleep deprived at 4 a.m. I had just fed my son and tried to put him back down but noticed he was especially warm. I whipped out my Mother’sTouch to take his temperature and realized it was abnormally high. My mom gave me some of the best parenting advice I’d ever received that night, and it’s time I pass it along.

“It’s not the temperature that’s the number one indicator of a fever, it’s how he acts.” She told me that, if he wasn’t showing signs of discomfort or illness, a slight variance in his body temperature was nothing to fret over.

Now, I am no medical expert but this little rule of thumb has certainly given me some piece of mind when it comes to whether or not to worry about my little one’s temperature.

There are many factors that can affect a baby’s temperature. That includes the temperature outside, their level of activity, their emotional and psychological status, eating, drinking and talking (if they can!)

The best thing to do to decide whether you should be worried about your child’s high temperature is to watch the way he or she acts. If he isn’t showing other signs of illness, just continue to closely monitor his temperature. It is also a very good idea to have a strong understanding of your child’s normal body temperature when they are healthy to give you a base to work from when they are ill.

To get an accurate measure of basal body temperature, you can take a sleeping person’s temperature in the morning while they are still asleep. It is best to get this reading with with a non-invasive thermometer that won’t wake the sleeping person.

You can also get a good idea of a person’s basal body temperature by taking their temperature right after they wake up. While this method will result in a temperature reading that is slightly higher than the true basal temperature, it will be very close and is often more convenient. If using this method, it is important to take the temperature while the sleeping person is still in bed, before they have begun to talk, eat, drink or move around.

Why should i know my basal body temperature?

Many people think that 98.6⁰F is a normal body temperature. They think that a temperature higher than 98.6⁰F is indicative of a fever. The problem with that theory is that 98.6 isn’t a “normal” temperature for every person.

Knowing your basal body temperature and your normal peak body temperature will help you better gauge when you have an abnormal temperature and when you don’t. It is a good idea to take these temperatures for your child as well.

Basal body temperature is also one indicator of ovulation for women trying to conceive. Ovulation predictor kits can be handy, but also very costly. Charting basal body temperature daily is one natural and cost-free way to monitor ovulation.

For more information about basal body temperature and ovulation tracking, please consult a doctor.

It is a common cause of confusion for parents, but it is important to wait at least two minutes between consecutive temperature measurements on most thermometers. Whether you are using the Mother’sTouch, a traditional stick thermometer or anything in-between, the devices must all readjust to the room’s temperature before the reading can be accurate.

This two-minute window is a step often missed when taking temperatures, and it leads to false or misleading temperatures.

If, after allowing the device to rest between readings, a large variance in the temperatures still exists there are a number of things to consider. It is important to analyze what your child has done between measurements that could affect the reading. For example: bathing, applying a washcloth to the forehead, drinking something cold, eating something warm, removing layers of clothing, moving around or even something as simple as talking. All of these can change a child’s temperature very quickly.

Changing these few habits should help ensure accuracy in temperature readings, and always remember that a slight variance (+/- .5 degrees) between readings is normal.

Carl August Wunderlich

It’s average.
[Average:  In mathematics, an average, or central tendency^[1] of a data set is a measure of the “middle” value of the data set. See definition of average.]

According the general population, many physicians and Google, a “normal body temperature”  is 98.6.  But what the are actually saying is that 98.6 is the average body temperature of a human adult.

Back in 1861, Carl August Wunderlich , a German physician and medical professor, conducted a study of body temperature. He used mercury thermometers to measure the armpit (or axillary) temperatures of 25,000 people and found the mean of be 37.0 °C (98.6 °F), with the range of 36.25 °C (97.25 °F) to 37.5 °C (99.5 °F)^[5][1].  Yep, that means some ran lower and some ran higher than the average …

Mercury thermometers are dangerous, and are no longer recommended for medical use. Some countries have downright outlawed them for medical use!

He found differences based on age, gender and a number of other individual characteristics.  He found that there are natural variations in temperature throughout the day.   All of these things still hold true today.

Wunderlich’s thermometers were not calibrated to a standard setting, and he never explained his methods for compiling and describing the data he had collected.

Most people (including me) weren’t actually aware of these things until now!  I guess this misconception explains why I so often hear other people say that anything above 98.6 “is a fever.”  Now I know that is not necessarily true!  Our “normal” body temperature is constantly changing throughout the day, and it changes as we age.  What it measures tomorrow will be different than what it measures today, and it is always subject to what we’re doing at the time we take a measurement.

Did you know that your “normal” body temperature:

• Is the lowest right when you wake up?
• Is the highest at the end of the day, right before you go to bed?
• Changes constantly, every second no matter whether you are fighting an infection or not?
• Is subject to small variances (.5+/-) depending on whether or not you are talking, eating or drinking?

"Normal" body temperature can be affected by normal activities.

So, what do you think? Is this news to you, or did you already know all about Wunderlich’s study and “normal body temperature?”

I get a lot of questions from other mommies and the media about the Mother’sTouch technology and how it is different than some of the other thermometer products on the market.  A lot of moms have heard of, or maybe even used, a “forehead thermometer” before.  And just like I did before I started working with Medisim, they clump all “forehead thermometers” into one category when in fact there are different kinds and technologies in different brands of forehead thermometers.

The oldest forehead thermometers were actually strips … these strips cling to the forehead and measure the temperature of the skin surface. This technology is not widely available anymore because it was met with a lot of criticism and was so violently subject to ambient conditions.

Forehead Strips

Another popular kind of forehead thermometer uses scanning technology. Just like the strips though, they measure the temperature of the skin surface – which is subject to ambient conditions.

A popular forehead thermometer

So, what’s the issue with the measurement on the skin surface?  Our skin is especially subject to changes in temperature given the conditions around us or our activities (like eating, running, talking, sitting in a hot or cold room, etc).  Measuring the skin surface is not measuring the core body temperature.

Medisim’s TempleTouch™ and Mother’sTouch™ thermometers measure  the heat flow under the skin surface in the temple area.  This is far less subject to ambient conditions and is not easily manipulated.  The technology used to calculate the temperature is called R.A.T.E, which you can read more about here.

Mother'sTouch measures the heat flow beneath the skin surface of the temple.

So, that sums it up.  While we offer a non-invasive way to measure temperature on the head, our technology is actually getting a clinically accurate reading beneath the skin surface.

Does this explanation help? Did you learn something new?  Still have questions?  Leave ‘em in the comments below!

Medisim, the makers of the best-selling TempleTouch™ thermometers, was hosting its annual gathering of its top executives in Europe in the summer of 2010. They were celebrating a great year and the success of the TempleTouch™ thermometer.  The TempleTouch was loved by moms the world over, won four consumer choice awards and was sold across the United States in some of the top retail chains.  Already leading the world in non-invasive thermometry, they wondered where they could go next.

They started talking about fevers and how a mother’s natural way of comforting her sick child was to cradle him in her arms, and, to detect the presence of a fever, mothers touch a hand to his head.  It was then that the light bulbs went off!  Ahh… it would use the same patented technology as TempleTouch (R.A.T.E.) and it would be called the Mother’sTouch.  It was then that Mother’sTouch™ was born.

It wasn’t long before the prototypes were developed.  Within a few months, the prototype was trademarked and presented to buyers and mothers at trade shows where it was met with rave reviews.

The first Mother’sTouch thermometer was launched in the United States in January 2011.

Welcome to the Mother’sTouch blog!  This blog is updated by the TempleTouchMom.  You see, Mother’sTouch is brought to you by the same company that makes the best-selling, award-winning TempleTouch™ thermometers.  It even uses the same technology that powers TempleTouch, only it has three sensors (instead of one) for improved coverage and guaranteed accuracy.

We hope that you enjoy the content here – which will focus mostly on frequently asked questions about Mother’sTouch, fevers, health, children and mommyhood!

Now, from Medisim, the leaders in non-invasive thermometry, comes the MothersTouch™ thermometer.

It is the first and only thermometer of its kind, and it is the most intuitive, gentle method of accurately getting a child’s temperature reading.  A mother gently places the base of the thermometer to her child’s temple for just 6-8 seconds and, with no effort or discomfort, gets a quick and accurate measurement.

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