The temperature difference method for screening patients with COVID-19 fever symptoms

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is a potentially fatal disease of global public health concern. Fever has been reported to be a common clinical symptom in COVID-19 and current CDC recommendations for mitigation of community COVID-19 transmission include temperature screening, so prompting widespread temperature screening across multiple sectors, including hospitals, office buildings and airports. The need for no-contact and rapid measurement of body temperature during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency has led to the widespread use of thermal imaging cameras. However, the body temperature measurement is also disturbed by the environment factors, including ambient temperature, background light etc. When the ambient temperature is low, the temperature of the patient will also be low. It was difficult to screen the fever patients by using the absolute temperature criteria, and it often result in missing detection. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposed a method of screening COVID-19 symptom fever patients by the body temperature difference detection. The temperature difference detection method combined the temperature measurement of the infrared imaging camera and the visible camera face recognition. This method will eliminate environmental interference and equipment errors, to reduce the probability of the fever missed detection.