Fighting Swine Flu with Simulations and Infrared Tech
The problem with simulation training is that the platform upon which users are trained too often has little in common with actual everyday operations, said an executive with a company recently in Mexico briefing government officials on response management to the swine flu outbreak and other crises.
Infrared imaging was in use during the 2003 SARS crisis, but Plastow said users were still then adapting to the technology and learning how to interpret the thermal images. It hasn't been used to a huge extent till this point, but Plastow believes the technology is sound for the purposes of health care.
While he said infrared imaging can hasten the detection process of people infected with the swine flu, "it's not an absolute indicator" because of other factors that influence body temperature, like a passenger who may have been exposed to warm weather before entering the building. But if anything, the technology will produce false positives, not false negatives, which can then be followed up with, said Plastow.
For those wary of the technology, Plastow said infrared is non-invasive, explaining that infrared is emitted from people, and that the heat detection devices themselves don't do the emitting.
