Are digital thermometers just wacky?

[stephen]

I have two oral thermometers in my bathroom drawer.

One says I'm 99.4.

One says I'm 98.6 when taken 30 seconds later.

Just don't know what to think.

[PeterW]

I would think that accuracy and precision are not the same.

[Sarcany]

With a consumer-grade digital oral thermometer, leave it in your mouth tucked tightly against the back of the bottom of your tongue for about 30 seconds before pressing the button to take your temp and then give it 30 seconds to get the result.

If you do this, you should find that they all fall within roughly .2 degrees of one another.

...Unless you get a really sh!tty one.

[MikeF]

Hot flash?

[jims]

My oral digital thermometer is very accurate, but my brand new ihealth touchless thermometer was over 3 degrees high right out of the box. The one at my work reads 2 degrees low. So much for accuracy.

jims

[Carnos Jax]

Accuracy denotes closeness to the truth, precision denotes repeatability of a measurement. For example an archer whose shots are tightly clustered but off target can be said to be precise. However if their grouping is more spread out but day average is centered on target, then they can be said to be more accurate than the former.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

PeterW wrote:
I would think that accuracy and precision are not the same.

Both thermometer offer the same level of precision.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

Carnos Jax wrote:
Accuracy denotes closeness to the truth, precision denotes repeatability of a measurement. For example an archer whose shots are tightly clustered but off target can be said to be precise. However if their grouping is more spread out but day average is centered on target, then they can be said to be more accurate than the former.

Precision denotes how many decimal places the thermometer can measure to. A thermometer that can measure to +/- 0.0001 degrees is said to be more precise than a thermometer than can measure to +/- 0.1 degrees.

[Carnos Jax]

So are accuracy and precision in that context being used to describe the same thing?

[N-OS X-tasy!]

Carnos Jax wrote:
So are accuracy and precision in that context being used to describe the same thing?

Accuracy denotes how close to the actual temperature the thermometer measures. If the actual temperature is 98.6 and the thermometer measures 99.9. it is not very accurate.