Thermometers & Touchdowns

Thermometers & Touchdowns

T&I Sarasota/Bradenton Runner-up

by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

A product originally designed for astronauts scores with football teams.

When customers look into buying a body temperature-reading pill from Palmetto-based HQ Inc., they tend to think the product is new to the market. If not this year, then maybe some scientist came up with it over the past few years.

Try 1990.

"Even though the product has been on the market almost 18 years, it still has a futuristic feel," says Susan Smith, HQ's sales and marketing manager. "It has taken a while for people to get used to the concept."

That concept revolves around measuring someone's temperature in a quick, consistent and scientific fashion, accomplished through HQ's patented and copyrighted CorTemp Pill and CorTemp Wireless Monitoring System. The pill and machine are both manufactured and sold from HQ's Palmetto headquarters.

HQ's sales model is broken down into two sections - the pill and the monitoring system. The pills cost about $30 each, while the corresponding machine, which can be used with multiple pills, runs about $2,200.

Smith says HQ, a privately held 15-employee company, had double-digit revenue growth in 2007 and expects similar growth next year. She declined to release specific revenue figures.

HQ has a quirky and diverse customer base, starting with athletes, as heat exhaustion has become a nationwide problem. College football teams, including both the University of Florida and the University of South Florida, have been clients the past few years and Smith recently signed up the NFL's Baltimore Ravens.

The company would like to expand its football reach to other colleges and even sell to high schools, although Smith concedes the monitoring system's high cost makes that tricky, especially for tight-budgeted entities like high schools. As such, one of HQ's biggest ongoing technological challenges, Smith says, is to find ways to bring the cost down without sacrificing the product.

Scientists and researchers at a Johns Hopkins University physics lab initially created CorTemp in the mid-1980s to study astronauts in hypothermic conditions in space. U.S. Sen. John Glenn took a CorTemp Pill when he rode the space shuttle in 2000.

About the size of a thumbnail, the pill is coated with silicone and contains a telemetry system, a 1.5-volt micro battery and a quartz crystal temperature gauge.

Once the FDA-approved pill is inside the gastrointestinal tract, a sensor vibrates relative to the temperature of the surrounding body tissue. That sensor then sends a harmless signal through the body to the data box, officially called the CorTemp Ambulatory Data Recorder. Pills stay effective in a person's system for 24 to 36 hours, changing based on someone's height, weight and other physiological factors.

An athletic trainer or a scientist can read a person's temperature within a few seconds by holding the recorder, about the size of pocket calculator, up to the subject's mid-section. To monitor an entire team, a trainer can program each player's uniform number into the recorder.

The CorTemp product has several other clinical uses, says Smith. It can monitor patients recovering from surgery, observe the level of fever during serious illnesses and measure temperature changes in the female reproductive cycle. The pill has even been used to read temperatures in a diverse list of non-humans, too, including racecar engines, cows, sea lions and dolphins.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Business: HQ Inc., Palmetto

Industry: Health care, research

Key: Firm's thermometer pill allows for quick and consistent temperature readings.