LocationsCOVID-19 Open-Source Innovation: Selfcheck Contactless Accurate Body Thermometer
The COVID-19 Detect and Protect Challenge is crowdsourcing open-source hardware innovations to tackle the disease. Every one of the 300+ innovations submitted is made freely available, with all instructions needed for others to build them. Here, we talk to Grand Prize Winners Vaclav Jirovsky and Milan Salajka, about their Selfcheck Contactless Accurate Body Thermometer.
Tell us about your solution. How does it address a specific need around COVID-19 response/recovery?
When the spread of COVID-19 started, you could find temperature scanning of all incomers at the entrance of buildings. Usually, there would be an officer with a thermometer and you were granted access to the building after passing the check. We modified a standard accurate thermometer gun and made it contactless, to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by removing any contact with other persons. Professional thermographic cameras could solve the issue, but costs around $30k, while our standalone contactless thermometer comes at a price under $150.
What was the inspiration behind the project?
We wanted to develop a cheap solution, which can be easily replicated and deployed anywhere. Our goal was to make it scalable, so that it can be easily deployed wherever necessary in buildings. Another goal we wanted to achieve was to connect the thermometer device to cloud and gather all the data at one place for real-time monitoring and for enablement of any future extensions or data analysis.
Why do you think open-source is so important in responding to COVID-19?
We find open-source to be the best way to distribute an innovative idea quickly across the world with minimum effort - e.g. in our country the Czech Republic, Josef Průša and his team developed (and released as open-source) a protective shield for healthcare professionals, which can be printed using a 3D printer. A few days later, the product was manufactured by many professional companies and hobbyists across the world. The fast distribution helped to save lives of first responders. Also, thanks to open-source, more help could be given to those in need because small companies and hobbyists need just a few hundred dollars for materials and little time costs to build the product.
What is the impact you hope to achieve with this solution?
We hope that our solution will reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19 during scanning by removing contact with a single point of spread (officer). We also hope that this will reduce queues that form in front of buildings caused by slow temperature scanning, which will save time for visitors.
What is one solution in the #COVID19DetectProtect challenge that you wish you'd built?
This challenge brought up many interesting solutions - one of them is the AI Digital Stethoscope which provides cheap but well-functioning digital stethoscopes as headphones for a phone with an AI engine. The other is the Face-Masks Disinfection Device, which provides disinfection mechanisms with a UV lamp.
About Vaclav Jirovsky and Milan Salajka: Vaclav focuses more on the software side, mostly on architecture and consulting of cloud applications. Milan is more focused on Internet of Things, hardware design and reverse engineering.