Transient Thermal Characteristics of a Heated Infrared Temperature Sensor for Noncontact Medical Thermometry

In this work, the transient responses of a heated infrared (IR) temperature sensor were investigated to improve the reliability of determined target temperatures obtained from IR-based medical thermometers. A medical-grade IR temperature sensor was heated at the lower edge of the sidewall of the sensor. To reduce the uncertainty due to the conversion factor of the thermal detector, the temperature of the target, which was a thermostatted blackbody source, was determined when the observed target temperature and the temperature of the detector coincided during the heating and cooling of the sensor. When the determined target temperature was compared with the blackbody source temperature, it was found that during heating, due to the produced temperature gradient in the sensor, the observed target temperature showed erroneous depressions, resulting in the determined target temperature being considerably lower than the true target temperature. In contrast, the determined target temperature during cooling of the heated sensor was consistent with the tested blackbody source temperatures within the claimed uncertainty at all heating conditions. Therefore, based on the obtained results, it was concluded that temperature measurements using an IR temperature sensor could be carried out with the least uncertainty by determining the target temperature when the observed target and detector temperatures coincided during cooling of the heated sensor.