Non-contact measurement system for COVID-19 vital signs to aid mass screening—An alternate approach

The entire world is facing a pandemic after the COVID-19 outbreak reported in Wuhan City in China. The number of newly infected cases and deaths are increasing on an hourly basis. The birth and spread of the n-coronavirus is a mystery to the world. Social distancing, staying home, and washing hands frequently with soap and water are the present norms for not getting infected or spreading it. The symptoms of a COVID-19 infected person are high fever, nasal congestion, aches and pains, difficulty in breathing, loss of smell and taste, and sore throat. The standard approach for screening any COVID-19 patient is to measure the body temperature, usually by infrared temperature sensors. This primary indication makes the person to be required to undergo the COVID-19 test. In most of the cases, the test results provide false positive and true negative kind of misclassification. Delay in finding the COVID-19 carriers makes it a challenging task for any healthcare administration to reduce the growth of positive cases. Few more vital signs like heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and body temperature are more relevant to make the person take the COVID test. In most of the screening tests at crowded places like airports, railways stations, and industries, the primary signs vital in detecting COVID are missed. Moreover, the measurement of all these physiological parameters requires dedicated measuring devices and skilled healthcare professionals. The cost of implementation and procurement gives more financial burden during this economic crisis. An alternate approach to measuring all these vital signs is extracting feature points from the thermal and or visible light reflected from the face of subjects. These feature sets are given to convolutional neural network (CNN) models for training and the trained model can predict the signs from the test inputs. The preliminary readings would be instrumental in suggesting the person undergo the COVID-19 test. It will also act as a continuous monitoring system to read the health condition of vulnerable and treatment undergoing persons. Such systems can be incorporated in any surveillance system and immigration zones to find overseas travelers’ health conditions. The risk of affecting healthcare field workers can be reduced. The possible implementation of health drones creates a pathway to Tele-diagnosis.