Nia Hamid Sharif, Pei Chong Pei, Huak Chan Yiong, Görgülü Özkan, Taghipour Behzad, FROELICHER Erika Sivarajan, PAHLEVAN SHARIF Saeed, Rahmatpour Pardis (2022).

Journal of Clinical Nursing, 31, 3272-3285., Doi:10.1111/jocn.16166

Abstract

Aim: To investigate the accuracy, reliability and agreement between infrared forehead thermometers versus infrared tympanic thermometers temperature, a cross-sectional study was conducted in April 2020.

Methods: The forehead and tympanic temperatures of 615 subjects were measured simultaneously in three exposed SARS-COV-2 groups at one hospital in Iran, during April 2020. These comparisons were evaluated by Bland-Altman Plot, repeatability, Passing-Bablok regression and Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was done to describe the discrimination accuracy of a diagnostic test. The study adhered to STROBE checklist for cross-sectional studies.

Results: A Bland-Altman plot indicated that the limits of agreement between the forehead and tympanic temperature were -0.259 to +0.19°C. Passing-Bablok regression analysis illustrated that the infrared forehead was not linearly related to tympanic temperatures (reference method), with a slope estimate that was significantly different from 1.00. The infrared forehead thermometer showed poor precision and lower accuracy than the tympanic. The forehead temperature readings had 60.0% sensitivity and 44.4% specificity (p > .05) to predict disease.