Pitching in for the national effort to fight coronavirus pandemic, the Navy has designed and developed its own handheld temperature sensor costing Rs 1,000. The temperature gun is manufactured through in-house resources of Naval Dockyard, Mumbai. If need, the Navy will ramp up production of these guns.
At present, these sensors, which are a fraction of the cost of temperature guns in the market, are used for screening of large number of personnel at the entry gates of the dockyard reducing the load on the security sentries at the gate.
The 285- year- old Naval Dockyard (ND) of Western Naval Command (WNC) has an average influx of around 20,000 personnel entering its premises every day. In view of COVID-19, initial screening of these personnel entering the dockyard was essential to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within the yard and the Western Fleet. The most preliminary method to screen a probable patient is to check for body temperature by a non-contact means.
Since the outbreak, the non-contact thermometers or temperature guns have become scarce in the market and are being sold at a very high cost. To overcome the scarcity and requirement of large numbers, ND (Mumbai) has designed and developed its own handheld IR based temperature sensor with accuracy of 0.02 deg Celsius. The non-contact thermometer has an Infrared sensor and an LED display integrated with a microcontroller which runs on a 9V battery, navy officials said here on Thursday.