Smart thermometers are tracking data on your fevers — and it’s helping stores keep medicine shelves stocked

• Kinsa's smart thermometer provides data on where illness is spreading.
• This winter is expected to be the worst for non-COVID illness in three years.
• The company's data can be used to tell retailers and brands where medicine will be in high demand.

Americans have had some experience with cleared out shelves in the last few years, but few instances are more vexing than showing up to the drugstore stuffed up and feverish only to find an empty space where the cold medicine should be. 

But this year at least one major drugstore chain and some big brands are using a new tool to forecast where sickness — and therefore demand for products like decongestants and throat lozenges — will be.

"I wanted to create a system that enabled early warning and forecasting," Inder Singh, founder of smart thermometer startup Kinsa, told Insider. "The obvious use cases are, where do I put the product?"

During the pandemic, Kinsa focused on the placement of vaccines and personal protective equipment. Now the company is helping to direct inventory management for major brands like Johnson & Johnson and Mucinex, as well as an unnamed retailer.

"We're now able to predict things like, where and when you need a cough medicine down to a store cluster level," said Singh. Kinsa's forecast for Mucinex demand was overall $2 million higher than the brands' retail partners predicted, according to the startup. 

Fever data is heating up 

Kinsa's smart thermometers cost between $24 and $40, and are sold by major retailers and pharmacies. The company also sometimes gives them away to health systems, and it partners with thousands of elementary schools to predict and prevent sickness outbreaks. Millions of its thermometers are in use and the company says it receives 100,000 temperature readings per day. 

The device works in tandem with what Singh calls a "triage" or "nurse in your pocket" app, launched in 2019, which asks about symptoms and the user's household to offer advice and keep a record that they can share with their doctors.

And for retailers, Kinsa can predict which types of medicines will need to be in stock in the next week or two as waves of cold and flu come through the local area. It does that by putting millions of users' (anonymized) data together to see symptom trends and identify hotspots for illness in the early stages of a big wave. 

For cold medicine brands like Mucinex, the very act of turning the thermometer on is a fairly solid demand signal. "Even if it's not a fever, we know someone in the household is sick," Singh said. "And then the software takes over and starts asking questions and gets all this other data." 

In past years, earlier iterations of Kinsa's data has been used by companies like Clorox to better place advertisements for cleaning products when germs are clearly about. Millions of users and three illness seasons of data made the Kinsa team confident that their automated demand forecasting tool is now fully ready. 

First the drugstore, then the world

It's still been a long road to explain Kinsa's value to retailers and brands. "No one has ever purchased outbreak analytics before," Singh said. 

The pandemic helped. 

Retailers are especially primed for new demand forecasting tools right now since COVID-19 introduced both spiking demand for health products and inventory shortages. 

Oftentimes, what looks like a shortage to a consumer — an empty store shelf — is really poor inventory management. The product just isn't in the right place. That's where granular demand forecasting comes in. 

Kinsa has taken 10 years to get to this point, but reaching the next level of Singh's vision could take decades more. The end goal is that hospitals and governments will use the data to make major decisions. 

"I have a very big uphill battle to get the CDC, WHO, New York City, Los Angeles, actually using it to make decisions and make an impact in the world," Singh said. "That's the win."