Hong Kong is one of the world’s major destinations for tourists and business visitors, with passenger arrivals and departures totalling around 300 million each year. With the commencement of new strategic facilities connecting Hong Kong and the Mainland, namely the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, the Hong Kong Section of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, and the soon-to-be-opened Liantang / Heung Yuen Wai Boundary Control Point, a surge in cross-boundary passenger traffic is expected. This will be accompanied by an increase of resource inputs into health quarantine measures—both in terms of manpower and facilities.

Safeguarding the community by preventing the spread of infectious diseases in Hong Kong is DH’s commitment. With an emphasis on the “3Rs” —Real-time surveillance, Rapid intervention and Responsive risk communication, the Port Health Office under the Centre for Health Protection of DH performs health screening on inbound travellers at all boundary control points. These measures aim to safeguard Hong Kong against infectious diseases, including human infection of Avian Influenza, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and the spread of other infectious diseases.

Fever screening is one of the foremost health measures at the airport and other boundary control points to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Based on thermal imaging technology, the existing Fever Screening system is already in place at all boundary control points, which can assist DH officers in performing body temperature checks on inbound travellers. It is an effective measure for identifying febrile subjects for further health assessment and has been adopted for screening a large number of travellers since the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003. However, a more intelligent fever screening solution for reducing manual effort and enhancing efficiency is desirable to cope with the increasing demand for health quarantine services.

Smart Fever Screening System.

EMSD shares the value of safeguarding the well-being of Hong Kong citizens by health quarantining and a task force is formed with DH and HKUST to collaborate on identifying the challenges of the existing Fever Screening system. The project team has handpicked the appropriate technologies for developing the novel Smart Fever Screening System that will cater for the specific operational needs of the user department.

In order to seamlessly integrate technologies with operational requirements, the project team has conducted a series of field studies at major boundary control points to look into the traffic patterns and environmental factors at different time slots of the day, including early morning and midnight. The project team has then proposed a solution which reduces manual effort, removes unwanted thermal artifacts and mitigates errors during fever screening.

EMSD and DH representatives introduced the development and application of the Smart Fever Screening System.

The solution of this project uniquely integrates thermal imaging, computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning, to enhance efficiency and enable digitisation of operation information. It also enables Hong Kong to become a “Smart Port” and an intelligent city in terms of public health.

The project team has spent 12 months developing this inventive system on a part-time basis. A prototype has been tried and proved to be effective in enhancing the efficiency of health clearance procedures. It will be able to enhance the health quarantine service at all boundary control points. In addition, the project obtains funding support from the Innovation and Technology Bureau’s TechConnect (Block Vote) and the project team is currently preparing a full-scale site trial of the new system at a selected boundary control point. The team has also filed this invention for patent protection and planned to eventually share its application with any interested members of the public.