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Navy develops Rs 1K temperature guns for Covid-19 screening
The temperature guns will be used for screening the 20,000 personnel who visit the dockyard daily in view of the coronavirus situation and this will reduce the workload of the sentries at the gates, the navy said.
The Naval Dockyard, Mumbai, has designed and developed a hand-held infrared temperature sensor and it has the capacity to scale up production if agencies require these instruments in large numbers to screen people for fever amid the Covid-19 outbreak, the navy said in a statement on Thursday.
The navy said the instrument had been developed to overcome the scarcity of temperature guns in the market where these were being sold at a very high cost.
“The instrument has been manufactured for under Rs 1,000 using in-house resources. The cost is a fraction of the price of the temperature guns in the market,” the statement said, adding that the country’s medical infrastructure was being tested by the surge in the count of Covid-19 cases.
The dockyard’s temperature sensor has an accuracy of 0.02 degree Celsius, it said.
The temperature guns will be used for screening the 20,000 personnel who visit the dockyard daily and this will reduce the workload of the sentries at the gates, the navy said.
“In view of Covid-19, initial screening of these personnel entering the dockyard was essential to prevent the spread of the disease within the yard and the navy’s Western Fleet. The most preliminary method to screen a probable patient is to check for body temperature by non-contact means,” the statement said.
As the country prepares to handle a rising number of cases and meet its need for ventilators, which about 5% of the Covid-19 patients may require, the navy has also pitched in with an innovative ventilator design that can cater to six patients simultaneously.
The Naval Dockyard, Visakhapatnam, has manufactured this portable multi-feed oxygen manifold ventilator.
“To cater to the requirement of oxygen supply for multiple patients during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, personnel from Naval Dockyard Visakhapatnam have designed an innovative ‘Portable Multi-feed Oxygen Manifold(MOM)’ using a 6-way radial header fitted to a single cylinder. This innovation will enable one oxygen bottle to supply six patients concurrently thus enabling critical care management to a larger number of Covid patients with the existing limited resources,” the navy said in a statement earlier this week.
