For Strips Comfort – the discreet temperature & LUX sensor, Sensative developed an algorithm for temperature reporting system that reports in regards to relevance. Instead of having a certain reporting interval, which is the norm, we have decided to bring down the total number of reportings without losing accuracy & speed when a temperature change happens.
Over the course of a whole day or a whole night, there are long periods of time where there are no significant changes in the temperature; therefore the device reports the same temperature over and over again. This can result in battery lifetime shortage. On the other hand, there are times when sudden and rapid changes in temperature happen frequently and for a device to capture these correctly, very frequently reporting has to be done.
What Strips Comfort does is it reads the temperature sensor once per minute and makes a decision if it should send a report or not according to the mode it is set: normal reporting or frequent reporting.
Normal reporting – as soon as a temperature difference of 2 degrees has occurred since the last report, a new report is sent. If it has been more than one hour since the last report, a difference of 1 degree also generates a new report. If 24 hours have gone by since the last report, a new report is always sent.
Frequent reporting – as soon as a temperature difference of 1 degree has occurred since the last report, a new report is sent. If more than 15 minutes have gone by since the last report and a temperature difference of 0.5 degrees has passed this also generates a new report. If 6 hours have gone by since the last reporting then a new report is always sent.
In the graph below you can see Strips (1) with frequent reporting (40-60 times per 24 hours) is compared with a sensor (3) that reports every 5 minutes (288 times per 24 hour). Even if Strips on average has far less reports sent, small rapid temperature changes were captured.
Curve (2) is Strips with normal reporting (20-30 times per 24 hour).
Typically, it is not common for a temperature sensor to be as accurate as Strips Comfort, with frequent reporting to track changes, to be compatible with battery longevity as this but due to this new algorithm it has been possible to combine accuracy with long battery life time.