A compact and hand-held infection-screening system for use in rapid medical inspection at airport quarantine stations: system design and preliminary validation

Abstract

To conduct mass screening and thereby reduce the spread of infection, a compact (13.5 cm × 8.5 cm × 2.5 cm), highly-mobile and hand-held infection-screening system was developed for rapid medical inspection in mass gathering places such as airports. The system is capable of non-contact vital-sign monitoring using two integrated sensors: a 24-GHz microwave radar for measuring heart and respiration rates and a thermopile array for capturing facial temperature. Subsequently, the system detects infected individuals using a linear discriminant function (LDA) from the derived vital-signs data. The system was tested on 10 subjects under two conditions (resting as normal and exercising as pseudo-infected, i.e. a 10-min bicycle ergometer at 100 W exercise); the normal and pseudo-infected conditions were classified successfully via LDA for all subjects (p < 0.01; classification error rate < 5%). The proposed non-contact system can be applied for preventing secondary exposure of medical doctors at the outbreak of highly pathogenic infectious diseases such as the Ebola virus.

• Infection control
• microwave radar
• non-contact
• thermopile
• vital signs

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowships for Young Scientists (13J05344) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC, Japan), Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Programme (SCOPE).

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.