NEW DELHI: Rising to the occasion, personnel of the Indian Navy’s Naval Dockyard, Mumbai have designed and developed its own low-cost handheld temperature sensor for undertaking screening of many personnel
Navy in its official release on Thursday said, “The instrument has been manufactured under Rs 1000 through in-house resources, which is a fraction of the cost of the temperature guns in the market”. It has an accuracy of 0.02 deg Celsius. It has an Infrared sensor and an LED display integrated with a microcontroller which runs on a 9V battery.
It was compulsions faced in screening its around 20,000 personnel entering the dockyard everyday which motivated the personnel of this 285-year-old Naval Dockyard of the Western Naval Command to come up with this innovation.
“In view of COVID-19, initial screening of personnel entering the dockyard was essential to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within the yard and the Western Fleet,” Navy said.
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.
Informing about the mass production possibility Navy said, 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.
Under the looming crisis country’s medical infrastructure is under stress and Naval Dockyards have chipped in with innovations to ameliorate the situation.
On last Monday, personnel of Naval Dockyard, Visakhapatnam designed an innovative ‘Portable Multi-feed Oxygen Manifold (MOM)’ using a 6-way radial header fitted to a single cylinder. This innovation would enable one Oxygen Bottle to supply six patients. A typical Oxygen providing facility at hospitals feeds only one patient.
The assembly has been tested and manufacturing has also begun.