As the temperature of your skin is largely affected by your environment during your awake period, whether you are outdoors, doing sauna or swimming, it is not relevant to use the data during your awake period for our analyses because we do not know the reliability of the measurements and what you were doing at that time. On the other hand, when you sleep, you are supposed to be more often in the same environment and you would expect temperature to be the same from day to day if there is no factor impacting your temperature.

This is why we do not give the exact absolute temperature in celcius (for example) because the temperature of your skin may sometimes be irrelevant depending on where you are. It is important to know that the temperature also varies a lot during your awake period in relation to your chronotype. It may be lower in the morning than in the afternoon by 0.8 degrees celcius for example. And much higher with physical activity. 

We use skin temperature on a biger scope by comparing your daily average during sleep to an average made of 14 days. This way we can detect daily significant temperature variations that make sense.

You can see your temperature variation in the activity analysis circle as a contributor of your energy score. And you can see the details, see the trend, and compare your daily value with a broader view in the sleep analysis graphs.

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Temperature variation is an essential metric to evaluate how your natural defenses respond to your environment. From a medical point of view, it is very important to measure body temperature. Indeed, many illness are accompanied by variations in body temperature.

When the variation is higher than +/- 0.8 degrees Celsius, that’s when you need to start paying attention. An advice would be measuring your body temperature with a thermometer when this happens.

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Any variance above or under your baseline can give a lot of crucial information. It can fluctuate with activity, your nutrition, your circadian rhythm, can indicate that your body fights against an illness, can reflect external environment changes such as a season change and can even reflect a woman’s menstrual cycle very clearly.

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Typically, the pattern for menstrual cycles is a temperature drop from your periods through your ovulation phase, followed by a rise from the end of your ovulation until the beginning of your next periods.

If you want to read more about the energy score you can read the article about Understanding the Circular® Energy score: are you ready or not for the day?