These days you need thermometers that are fast and easy to read so that you can quickly figure out whether you should start worrying about the dreaded viral infection going around.
Gone are the days of the good old mercury thermometer that my parents would tuck beneath my tongue whenever I came back home from school, feeling feverish. It took ages to confirm whether I was really running a temperature high enough to be able to bunk school the following day. Sometimes those cylindrical glass tubes, with a tiny bulb at the end, refused to register body heat. The delicate tubes would break easily, in case my parents or I became a bit fidgety. And it was not possible to read the temperature unless you held it at a certain angle, especially during power cuts.