While COVID19 cases are on the rise globally, a research scholar at North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Meghalaya has developed a thermal device for thermal screening of people for the virus.
The low-cost device has been developed by Vinayak Majhi who is serving as a research scholar under the guidance of assistant professor Sudip Paul at the Biomedical Instrumentation and Signal Processing laboratory of NEHU.
Assistant professor Sudip Paul said they took three-and-half days to develop the contact-less temperature device.
He said it was developed after coming to know that there was no such proper device available in the market for measuring the human body temperature from a distance in the NEHU campus.
On March 25, the device was handed over to NEHU registrar Prof. J.N.Nayak.
Prof Nayak said they were searching for the handheld thermometers from Shillong and Guwahati but it was not available.
“However, the research scholar came with a proposal to develop a low-cost tool to monitor the temperature of the body and we are happy that it was developed and now utilized in the campus,” he said.
According to NEHU sources, the device is now utilized at the main gate of the university campus for screening people entering the university.
Sudip Paul said, “Compromising with the outlook of the device, it can measure the body temperature very efficiently without touching the patient from a distance.”
He further said the device can measure the body temperature from one feet distance and show the temperature in Fahrenheit as well as the Celsius scale.
In order to measure the temperature, the examiner has to put the device in front of the patient’s face, and the device itself will measure the right distance or gap, Paul shared.
Assistant professor Paul also said the essential difference of this device with other non-contact Infra Red thermometers is that all those devices don’t have an indication of the distance from the device with the object.
He also said the range is significant as the energy of thermal radiation decreases with the distance.
