The Singapore innovation, known as iThermo, was developed by the Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), a technology agency for public healthcare, and local medtech start-up KroniKare.
It is currently being piloted at the IHiS headquarters in Serangoon North and St Andrew's Community Hospital in Simei.
The device, which can measure temperature up to 3m away, will generate an alert when someone with a fever walks by it.
Speaking to reporters at the IHiS headquarters yesterday, chief executive Bruce Liang said healthcare institutions and businesses find it challenging to perform large-scale temperature screening quickly.
He added that the new device would minimise long queues and allow staff to attend to other pressing needs. "The whole idea is to detect those who may be febrile in a crowd... instead of manually scanning everyone for their temperature."
He said the device can be deployed easily in places where large groups are being funnelled through a few entry points.
In the past few days, long queues have been reported at some office buildings that have started temperature screening of workers and visitors as part of heightened measures to tackle the coronavirus outbreak.
The new device analyses the images from the smartphone camera, which captures facial features, and maps the images to those from the thermal and 3D cameras, which measure temperature and distance, respectively.
The device feeds real-time updates, such as how many febrile individuals were detected, to a dashboard, which enables remote monitoring of the status at various sites.
KroniKare has ramped up the production of the device, with 100 units to be made available for deployment by the end of the month.
CREDIT: Calvin Yang
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