a nurse walks into the hospital room, wakes the patient and subjects him to what for many remains a humiliating procedure, although it has become routine: insertion of a rectal thermometer.

The program, called Patient Monitoring at Home, provides each person with a set of devices: a thermometer, blood pressure ...

D.O., family medicine physician at Northwell Lenox Hill Hospital. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a fever if you don’t have a thermometer nearby—you just can’t tell for sure.