A design for low cost and scalable non-contact fever screening system

Scientific advancements in multiple disciplines of engineering can be applied to a variety of industries, including defense, aerospace, and medicine. In the modern healthcare industry, for instance, biomedical engineers working with a multidisciplinary team can provide solutions to physicians to aid in disease diagnosis. In a situation such as flu pandemic it may be desirable to do rapid screening for fever detection. In an academic setting, fever screening can help in separating normal healthy students from those with suspected fever. This is the motivation to design and develop an easy-to-use low cost temperature measurement device. The objective of this multidisciplinary project is to design a low-cost, scalable, rapid, and effective device for fever screening that can be applied to a wide variety of situations, such as, classrooms or laboratories during a wide-spread flu pandemic. The project is also aimed at ensuring that the student learning leads to many of the standard outcomes. The proposed design is divided into four sections: Measurement, Control, Communication, and Monitoring. The sensor selected for the Measurement implementation is a medical grade version of the Melexis MLX90614 series of smart infrared temperature sensors. Two Texas Instruments MSP430 microprocessors are selected to implement Control and Monitoring. Communication is implemented using an 868 MHz wireless network. For laboratory testing of the proposed fever screening system, the temperature sensor is mounted on a gantry at the entrance to a lab or lecture hall and the students walk through the gantry sequentially. When a high temperature suggesting fever is measured, an alarm will sound alerting the person controlling the entrance to divert the suspected student to go to infirmary for further testing. The temperature measurement is also done with a mobile temperature scanner to screen students in line at various entrances to the lab or lecture hall. Preliminary testing has validated the feasibility of the proposed fever screening system in the mobile sensory mode. The educational aspects of this multidisciplinary project based on experimentation and lab-oriented studies are demonstrated, and the learning outcomes are promising. In conclusion, this undergraduate laboratory-developed system, applied to multidisciplinary fields shows the feasibility of fever screening in a small to medium scale subject cluster and supports the lab teaching pedagogical approach for multidisciplinary laboriented studies.