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Health

The temperature of your face could help diagnose medical conditions

Small changes to the temperature of your cheeks, nose and around your eyes could let an AI estimate how old you are and flag issues like diabetes and high blood pressure

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

2 July 2024

Average facial temperatures of 50-60-year old women ageing slowly (left), as predicted (middle) or fast (right)

Little changes in average facial temperatures can reveal your age and whether you have certain medical conditions

Zhengqing Yu and Jing-Dong J Han

If your cheeks are subtly warmer than is usual, it could be a sign of rising blood pressure that could be detected by artificial intelligence. Little changes like this in the heat patterns of people’s faces could also flag certain other medical conditions, such as diabetes and fatty liver disease and even be used to estimate age.

Jing-Dong Han at Peking University in Beijing, China, and her colleagues used a commercial, hand-held thermal imager…

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