Are thermal cameras a magic bullet for COVID-19 fever detection? There's not enough evidence to know - Jakarta Post

But the evidence suggests thermal cameras are far from a perfect solution, offering limited accuracy if set up incorrectly, and raising data privacy concerns.

If temperature screening incorrectly detects many people as having a fever, then healthcare services will be burdened by needless secondary assessments.

The requirements for training and cleaning are a major drawback during a pandemic and are the reason these tools are not widely used for mass fever screening.

As a result, both government and industry are deploying automated systems involving infrared thermal cameras instead to perform fever-screening from facial temperature measurements.

These systems are sometimes seen as a magic bullet for mass fever screening.

However, there is a glaring lack of clinical evidence for thermal camera-based fever screening solutions.

To our knowledge, no thermal imaging system has been approved as a medical device by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration.

The skin on a person’s face is not one single temperature, and does not uniformly reflect their core body temperature, which is needed to assess fever.

In 2017, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released guidelines on how to deploy thermal camera systems to account for these factors.

In addition, many thermal camera systems include facial recognition capabilities to make it easier to identify anyone who triggers an alert.

Currently, in the case of thermal cameras for mass fever screening, the obligation would be to ensure the systems follow the recommendations put forward by the ISO, and avoid providers who don’t comply