A Comprehensive Review of Non-Invasive Core Body Temperature Measurement Techniques

Core body temperature (CBT) is a fundamental physiological parameter tightly regulated by thermoregulatory mechanisms and is critically important for heat stress assessment, clinical management, and circadian rhythm research. Although invasive measurements such as pulmonary artery, esophageal, and rectal temperatures provide high accuracy, their practical use is limited by invasiveness, discomfort, and restricted feasibility for continuous monitoring in daily-life or field environments. Consequently, extensive efforts have been devoted to developing non-invasive CBT measurement and estimation techniques. This review provides an application-oriented synthesis of invasive reference methods and representative non-invasive approaches, including in-ear sensors, infrared thermography, ingestible telemetric sensors, heat-flux-based techniques, and model-based estimation using wearable physiological signals. For each approach, measurement principles, accuracy, invasiveness, usability, and application domains are comparatively examined, with particular emphasis on trade-offs between measurement fidelity and real-world implementability. Rather than ranking methods by absolute performance, this review highlights their relative positioning across clinical, occupational, and daily-life contexts. While no single non-invasive technique can universally replace invasive gold standards, recent advances in wearable sensing, heat-flux modeling, and multimodal estimation demonstrate growing potential for practical CBT monitoring. Overall, the findings suggest that future CBT assessment will increasingly rely on hybrid and context-aware systems that integrate complementary methods to enable reliable monitoring under real-world conditions.