You can help in this pandemic and pre-screening can save lives. Press Headlines like “Temperature Screening is Ineffective, says US, UK,…” are a misleading simplification that confuses cause and effect and can lead to passivity and resignation..

As a specialty distributor that sells Kentix SmartXcan to pre-screen for Elevated Body-Temperature or Fever, we believe in the cause and the technology.

IPVM had been pointing out all along that most IP camera-based thermal temperature screening solutions were producing misleading or even bogus results. This is exactly what caused statements like from “UK Government warns Unreliable-Do not Work” or Dr Fauci’s “Fever Screening is notoriously inaccurate”. Many devices being sold are ineffective and when compounding this with the fact that there are many pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic cases that fever screening naturally will miss, it is easy to come to a false conclusion to "Throws out the baby with the bathwater".

Intelligence and competence need to prevail and it's important to fully analyze a rather complex set of circumstances more carefully to understand what these devices are actually doing and how they work. So let’s start from the beginning. Nothing changed in the fact that people with fever are often highly contagious if fever detection is done right, regardless of how it will help prevent contagion. The real issue is to do it reliably.

The dilemma is that every supplier of camera equipment jumped on the bandwagon and started pitching solutions based on thermal sensors reading the skin surface. Climate, sun, or AC exposure prior to entry, natural differences between people’s skin temperature make the simple reading of large skin surfaces like forehead inadequate for the purpose of determining fever.

However, that does not mean that thermal radiometry when used right can't be useful. The answer is in applying the technology correctly and understanding that the goal is not to read a perfect skin temperature but to find a correlation that shows there is a high likelihood of the person having an elevated body temperature or a fever. This can be done by focusing on individual people from the front at relative close distance. Get a complete temperature scan of the face and process it with algorithms that find areas like the inner canthus which have a high correlation with body temperature and combine the results with readings from the forehead and other areas of the face. Compare these with at least room temperature maybe even add outside temperature to the mix and applying either a formula that has proven successful or deep learning derived pattern to recognize high-body temperature and give us a result that is highly correlated with the individual’s body temperature.

To do this right requires dedication, focus, and a multi-disciplinarian team that not only understands thermal radiometry but also experience with, very precise room temperature, humidity correlation to temperature radiation, basic object recognition, time of flight lasers, AI, ergonomics, workflow, design and software development and a passion for the solution. This is what Kentix has been doing and why we want to help make their products availabel for those that want to have a pre-screening solution.

We are convinced that together you as a technology integrator and we as IP technology specialty distributors we can make a difference.