Mumbai Naval Dockyard designs low cost temperature guns to fight coronavirus

Naval Dockyard, Mumbai has designed and developed its own handheld IR based temperature sensor for undertaking screening of large number of personnel at the entry gates of the yard reducing the load on the security sentries at the gate. The instrument has been manufactured under Rs. 1000/ – through in-house resources (which is fraction of the cost of the Temperature Guns in the market).

The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has led to one of the biggest medical emergencies the world has witnessed in the recent times. View massive surge in the number of infected patients, the medical infrastructure of the nation is being put to its ultimate test.

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 a Infrared sensor and an LED display integrated with a microcontroller which runs on a 9V battery. This initiative has provided a tool for undertaking screening of large number of personnel at the entry gates of the yard thereby reducing the load on the security sentries at the gate.

With the manufacturing cost of less than Rs 1000/- the dockyard has the capability to scale up production of these if required towards which sourcing of the components is in progress.