Relationships and Comparisons of Finger Surface Temperature Measurements from Three Different Kinds of Temperature Sensors

Abstract

Temperature biofeedback has been used in behavioral medicine for more than three decades. Traditional temperature biofeedback uses the contact sensor of a thermistor to measure one’s finger surface temperature. The goal of this study is to discover new valid sensors for temperature biofeedback. Sixteen healthy young adult volunteers (23.1±2.0 years old) practiced cognitive imagery muscle relaxation with three kinds of temperature sensors (thermography imaging, thermistor, and infrared thermopile) to measure their finger surfaces simultaneously. The temperature readings from different sensors were synchronically videotaped and converged to video files for analyses. The data were selected every half a minute from a fixed section of the muscle relaxation procedure to show the outline of the temperature variation. Twenty-eight means of skin temperature measurements from each sensor resulted in overall correlation coefficients of R=0.98 (p<0.001) between the thermistor and thermography imaging sensors, R=0.95 (p<0.001) between thermography imaging and infrared thermopile sensors, and R=0.96 (p<0.001) between thermistor and infrared thermopile sensors. These results suggest that contact and non-contact temperature sensors could demonstrate good synchronous temperature covariance in measuring finger surface temperature. This study also proposes specific setups for instrumentation of finger surface temperature monitoring.