One of the factors that make controlling a pandemic like the COVID-19 virus so challenging is the colossal feat of finding out who, out of the billions of people on the planet, is infected. Individually testing each person in a city takes a long time, and most people don’t even go to get checked, so it’s complicated to know how widespread the disease is.
To make this problem a little easier to manage, the University of South Australia (UniSA) and Canada-based drone technology specialist Draganfly Inc have partnered up to develop a “pandemic drone” platform. The device uses computer vision and specialized sensors to pick out the people with infectious respiratory diseases in a crowd – such as at an airport, on a cruise ship, in an office or anywhere groups of people congregate.
The UniSA team led by Defence Chair of Sensor Systems Professor Javaan Chahl is developing a drone fitted with remote sensing that can monitor temperature, respiratory and heart rates. It can also detect people coughing and sneezing thanks to a computer algorithm developed to interpret human actions.
Professor Chahl initially unveiled the technology in 2017 with Ali Al-Naji and Asanka Perera. They demonstrated the system’s ability to measure heart rate and breathing and analyze movements from as far as 33 feet (10 meters) using drone videos and up to 165 feet (50 meters) from fixed cameras.
Professor Chahl said:
It might not detect all cases, but it could be a reliable tool to detect the presence of the disease in a place or in a group of people.
Professor Chahl notes that the technology was initially intended to be used in natural disasters and war zones, as well as to monitor the heart rates of premature babies in incubators remotely. However, now he sees it’s a viable screening tool for the coronavirus pandemic. He said:
Now, shockingly, we see a need for its use immediately, to help save lives in the biggest health catastrophe the world has experienced in the past 100 years.
Draganfly CEO Cameron Chell added:
We are honored to work on such an important project given the current pandemic facing the world with Covid-19. Health and respiratory monitoring will be vital not only for detection but also to understand health trends.
They plan to “immediately start integrating commercial, medical, and government customers,” but no further details have been provided regarding exactly when we’ll be seeing these drones flying around.
