Development of a non-contact screening system for rapid medical inspection at a quarantine depot using a laser Doppler blood-flow meter, microwave radar and infrared thermography.

Matsui, T; Suzuki, S; Ujikawa, K; Usui, T; Gotoh, S; Sugamata, M; Badarch, Z; Abe, S

In order to conduct fast screening of passengers with infections such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or pandemic influenza at a quarantine depot, we developed a non-contact screening system with a self-produced program to conduct a human screening within five seconds, via a linear discriminant function from non-contact derived variables, i.e. palmer pulse derived from a laser Doppler blood-flow meter, respiration rate determined by a 10-GHz microwave radar, and facial temperature measured by a thermography. The system evaluation was conducted on seven healthy male subjects (23+1 years). In order to achieve a pseudo-infection condition, the subjects maintained an ergo-meter exercise load (100 W, 10 minutes). Before (normal condition) and after (pseudo-infection condition) exercise, a significant linear discriminant function (p50.001) was determined to distinguish the pseudo-infection condition from the normal condition (Mahalanobis D-square 1/4 20.3, classification error rate55%). The proposed system appears promising for future application in fast screening of infection at a quarantine depot.