Feeling feverish? This smart gate won’t open for you

Coimbatore: With frontline workers battling Covid-19 pandemic, researchers and innovators continue to rack their brains to come up with solutions that could help contain the spread of the virus in workspaces and industries.

Now, innovators from Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Sathyamangalam, Erode, have come up with an automatic fever detection gate to screen body temperature and let people in only if their temperature is normal. This eliminates human element completely in temperature screening procedures at workplace entrances.

L Rajasekar, an assistant professor at the institution’s special labs and project advisor, said the device comprises of a passive infrared sensor which detects the presence of a person, a sensor to measure his/her temperature and a control unit. In the prototype, they have used a motor to open and close a gate.

When the person is at an optimal distance for the device to read his temperature, a controller will trigger the temperature sensor which records and processes the body temperature. If the measured temperature is below 99°F, the normal, a green LED indicates it and the gate is opened. If the temperature exceeds 99°F, it will be considered as fever, indicated by a red light and the gate would remain closed.

Rajasekar, who worked on the project along with engineering trainees R Gokul Raj, and S Karthik, said they have also incorporated a WiFi module in the control unit which would log the temperature data to a cloud storage. “Using this data, we can analyse variations of a person’s body temperature,” he said.

The project took two months to finish, while the prototype was completed last week. Rajasekar said they were planning to contact industries to take it to production level. “If industries already have the automated gate component, we could provide them with control unit and sensors... the prototype costs around Rs 4,500. We can also customise the setup based on requirements,” he said.


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