Presenting XTEMP at MHSRS 2026: Closing the Gap on Contactless Core Temperature Monitoring
Last week, our team had the privilege of presenting XTEMP at the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS) in Florida — bringing together over the course of a few days some of the sharpest minds in combat casualty care, human performance optimization, and force health protection.
We came away energized, and not just because of the science. The best part of MHSRS is always the same: conversations that start at a poster board and turn into real collaboration. This year was no exception — we connected with researchers from USUHS, MTEC, and clinicians from across the force who are tackling heat injury and thermal monitoring from every angle imaginable.
The Problem We're Working to Solve
Exertional heat illness remains one of the most persistent — and preventable — threats to military readiness. In 2024, the U.S. Armed Forces recorded crude incidence rates of 36.4 heat-stroke cases and 183.9 heat-exhaustion cases per 100,000 service members. Core body temperature is the most direct available physiological indicator of thermal strain, yet the current gold standard — rectal and esophageal probes — is invasive, logistically constrained, and impractical for routine monitoring during training or operations. That gap between what we need to measure and what's actually feasible in the field is exactly what XTEMP was built to close.
How XTEMP Works
XTEMP is a contactless platform that monitors thermal activity — specifically, core body temperature — from the back of the eye. A dual optical and long-wave infrared camera captures the face; 68-point facial-landmark detection isolates the ocular surface and extracts pixel-wise temperature from roughly 3,800 points on the exposed eye. That surface temperature is then run through a gradient-based inverse optimization against a physics-based model of the eye — accounting for the eye's vascularized and perfused tissue layers along with convective, radiative, and tear-evaporative boundary conditions — to recover an estimate of core temperature at the posterior boundary of the eye. The entire acquisition takes under one second, with no contact and no per-subject calibration
What We Presented: Clinical Validation Under Heat Stress
The data we shared at MHSRS came from a study conducted under an approved Texas Tech University IRB protocol, evaluating XTEMP's ability to track core temperature over time under a hot environmental condition (34°C, 40% relative humidity). Eight participants (6 male, 2 female) completed a 60-minute intermittent treadmill protocol — alternating jogging (5–8 mph) with a weighted march (20–40 lb vest) — while we recorded 13 synchronized measurement epochs per subject, yielding 104 paired observations against a rectal reference probe.
The results were encouraging. Individual regression tracking between XTEMP and rectal temperature held strong, with within-subject correlation at r = 0.961 and a group-level bias of just +0.230°C (95% limits of agreement: -0.69 to +1.15°C). XTEMP reproduced the shape of the rectal temperature trajectory closely, tracking the direction and timing of the physiological response with no detectable lag through the run phase; a small, systematic divergence emerged only after the transition to load carriage, growing to roughly +0.56°C by minute 55 — a compartment-timing effect rather than a loss of signal.
We also derived a Heat Strain Index from each temperature source independently, referenced to each participant's own baseline. Agreement between the two indices was excellent — ICC(2,1) of 0.940, well above the 0.697 we saw for the raw temperature values — and XTEMP identified every participant and every epoch that crossed the high-strain threshold, with a median 10-minute lead over the rectal reference. In other words: as a screening signal for rising strain, it wasn't just accurate, it was early.
What This Means
The rectal probe reflects the low-perfusion, high-inertia core compartment; the posterior orbit is perfused through the ophthalmic branch and responds to circulatory and thermal load somewhat differently. Under sustained heat stress, the two are phase-locked in timing and direction, which is exactly what we'd want from a screening and monitoring tool — even where absolute agreement in degrees still has room to tighten.
For an operational use case, that distinction matters. A measurement requiring only a camera — no contact, no consumables, no calibration, deployable under one second — is already well-suited to rapid screening and triage at the point of need, where the trend matters as much as the absolute value.
Where We Go Next
Two things are ahead of us. Clinically, we're completing enrollment to 30 participants across both environmental conditions and adding a second reference standard to help resolve the compartment-lag question we're seeing in the load-carriage phase. On the product side, we're continuing hardware development in collaboration with Teledyne FLIR, moving XTEMP from its current tethered prototype toward an embedded, wearable glasses form factor built for hands-free, continuous assessment.
That's the step that will prove whether this technology can genuinely change how we monitor and protect service members from heat-related illness — and it's the work our MHSRS conversations this year helped sharpen.
Grateful for the questions, the pushback, and the collaborators who make conferences like this worth the trip. Onward to field testing.
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