Supporter: Costain

The economic impact of COVID19 on the UK’s airports has been devastating. This summer John Holland-Kaye, chief executive of Heathrow told Sky News that the company had lost £500,000 million in the first half of 2020. He called on government to support the industry in keeping the borders open in a safe way. “We need to have a more targeted, a more sophisticated way of opening our borders so that we keep people safe, but we allow people to get back to work in as normal a way as possible. We are going to be living with this for a long time, and if our response is to close down our country, as a small island trading nation, we will kill our economy and millions of jobs will be lost that could be saved,” he said.

In our interconnected world, the aviation industry may be the first to feel the economic sting of our attempts to fight COVID19, but others are sure to follow if nothing changes. Legislation, flexible quarantining strategies and breakthroughs in test and trace can only get us so far. Vast numbers of people need to travel through airports to keep our global economy moving, which means that something needs to be done to screen this human tide and keep riskier individuals from travelling, while providing reassurance to passengers, airlines, and governments alike.

One solution to this comes from British smart infrastructure solutions company, Costain, who we have partnered with on this episode. Costain is bringing a camera-based temperature screening system to UK airports[IP1] , a measure that has already been adopted in other countries.

Airports Stress Tested

For most people, travelling through an airport means rushing from queue to queue in an unusual environment along with thousands of other people. Some will be delayed, there will be complaints, grumbles, outsize baggage to check at the special desk at the end of the concourse… With the additional COVID19 restrictions, airports will be stress-tested even further. Adding an extra layer of complexity to the system needs to be done extremely carefully with a deep understanding of the airport environment.

“Before COVID19 airports were very busy places, and some days busier than others. If you come to the summer holidays, you can reach such a peak of people flying through them. So on a day to day basis and airport had many challenges just to make sure the customer had an enjoyable experience when they arrived,” says Fiona O’Shea, a key account director in the aviation sector at Costain. Fiona has spent the majority of her 20-year career working in an area of operations related to unloading and loading aircraft, known as underwing. She says that minimising queuing and ensuring good facilities are key to passenger experience. “They have to make sure they had the right facilities open and timely communication to customers. What is really important as well is to make sure that all their systems are running and effective.”

Fiona is passionate about air travel, having spent so many years helping the machine run smoothly and was devastated when Covid struck. “The airport is fundamentally important for the whole economy. And, you know, the issue we have is that passenger numbers have dropped significantly, I mean, 97% and since COVID19. Airports and airlines need to provide passengers with confidence that it’s safe to fly.”

And this is a new challenge for aviation. Operators mustmake sure that the airport is clean, ask people to wear facemasks, enforce social distancing, and provide information for customers. And now they have the ability to employ a new camera system that checks passengers for elevated temperature. “Our technology is helping to de risk flying by adding another layer in a Swiss cheese model to help prevent those with one of the symptoms of COVID from flying,”

The Swiss Cheese Model likens human systems to multiple slices of swiss cheese, stacked side by side, in which the risk of a threat becoming a reality is mitigated by different types of defences which are “layered” behind each other, as holes in the cheese disappear as you stack more slices together. Therefore, in theory, weaknesses in one defence are mitigated by other defences in other layers. The more layers of security that are added, in a simplified and integrated system, the less risk presented to passengers.

Configuring Thermal Cameras

But what about the technology? Rob Middleton leads the surveillance and situational awareness team in Costain’s digital products and services business. Rob was keen to explain that the cameras are not COVID19 detectors. “It is not a medical device technology. It is not providing medical grade temperature measurements. It’s a screening solution, particularly for large volumes of people when it’s impractical to do that, to take temperatures of individuals.”

The camera isa system that enables the airport to filter out, with more confidence, the vast majority of travellers who are not sick. This is a common goal for digital measurement in multiple industries – to sieve data so that only when human intervention is needed, a problem is flagged for attention.

“Elevated body temperature systems have typically four main components. The first is the camera itself and most of the systems that we deal with have a combined thermal imager and optical camera – a normal visible light camera – in the same housing. The second part is the blackbody which is used for calibration.”

The third part is a sort of video recording device or a network video recorder to record images and data. And the fourth part of it is actually is typically an additional display screen, because Costain have observed that people are very, very interested to know how the system is working for measuring them. This is something that goes back to human nature. When people see themselves on screen, they invariably look at the screen. So if you put the display monitor next to the camera itself, people can’t help but give the system a perfect view of their faces. “Which helps the whole identification as well as, as well as I think providing transparency and confidence for the users that we’re not trying to make very intrusive recordings,” says Rob.

Alongside the hardware airports have to consider the configuration of the system and the camera itself. “So small sensors tend to give quite a narrow field of view or quite short range and larger sensors tend to be very, very expensive,” says Rob.

There is also a choice around layout, how to physically set the system up in the airport. Remember, it is having to be rolled out quickly, experimentally, as a rapid response to deal with the pandemic. It is not fixed neatly into place or designed into the building itself – it involves tripods… and leads plugged into wall sockets. So placing the components carefully is a key issue. And Rob explains that a major part of his work is advising the user on how best to utilise the system, rather than just dropping the camera off and leaving them to it. “One of the key requirements to give improved accuracy is the use of a blackbody which is to calibrate the camera in a continuous way. So that the cameras the blackbody does is it maintains a very, very accurate 35 degrees C and then that improves the precision and the accuracy with which the thermal imaging camera can measure body temperatures. But of course the thermal blackbody has to be within the field of view of the camera.”

And because facial identification is used to help tell the camera where to look for the right body temperature. “You actually have to think quite carefully about how the subjects of your screening technology will move through that field of view of the camera,” says Rob explaining that users have to consider if thet will come close enough for long enough and whether it is groups or individuals “All that’s a considerable amount of work. To get a system that works really well for our clients, and we’ve been on a really rapid learning curve there to, to build on our position there and we think we’ve got quite a lot of knowledge in terms of what will work and what won’t.”

As this is a mass screening system, there needs to be as few false alarms as possible.Hot coffee cups for example should be filtered out and only relevant or confusing cases passed to a human for further checks. “Typically, you would set the template feature, we’re finding most clients setting in third around in between 37.3 to 37.5. And the reason for doing that is that it gives it will create a trigger alarm. “

If you then take into account the 0.3 degrees Celsius error bar, it will trigger the alarm before body temperature gets into a high 37, or low 38, which is critical, as some national regulators are saying that people should not be getting onto planes if their temperature is 38. “So by going in that bit low and you create instead of having screen everybody what the firm the body temperature screening solution is doing is really down selecting to a small number of people who are more interesting and more likely to be febrile.”

Going with the Flow

Once you have the camera system sorted, the next major question is where to locate it in the airport. “Passenger flow is always important at an airport is people really don’t want to queue,” says Fiona. “And if you think now in a COVID world, it’s much more even more important because people are very conscious about their own space. And they don’t want to be you know, around other people. So when we were looking at the camera, it was really important to make sure that we had a camera that could screen multiple people. And also the people didn’t have to stop and look at the camera.”

This is also really important for arriving customers. “So you’ve got off their aircraft, you’re coming into the country, and the airports want to make sure that you to have been looked out for no elevated temperatures. So it’s again important to really look at where the cameras are going. And it’s not impacting that flow.”

But there are technical considerations to be balanced against airport requirements. Rob says that it’s really attractive to screen people even before they come into the airport or at the front door. But the risk of that is that that you get large number of false alarms or false positives particularly in hot weather. “We’ve seen some interesting false alarms caused by people. Actually, one of our project sites they go out for, you know, for lunch or for a cigarette break or something and they come back in and their skin is very hot whether their skin is very hot. And that creates a false positive. And of course, you can handle a few false positives, but having large numbers becomes really painful.”

Of course, most airports are climate controlled inside giving a consistent basis for testing in the terminal. Further along the passenger journey there are many potential options for testing locations. Rob suggests check in, boarding card screening or gate screening are all points at which cameras could be used.

“We also have systems where the screen and the crew, the flight and cabin crews as they come through the airport,” says Rob. “So and obviously those different volumes, if and if you could imagine, obviously a plane, you might need to do 300 to 400 people for a long haul, long haul flight, maybe more in the space of maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And that. So that gives you a sort of an idea about the numbers per minute you need to look through.”

But of course, if the cameras are in arrivals or the departures area there are huge sums of people coming through, which would mean a bigger array of cameras. For now operators are testing out their preferred arrangements, and noticing some interesting behaviours from passengers.

“We saw some false alarms where what seems to happen where the temperature is way above anything that would be survivable for us,” says Rob. People were trying to trick the system. “By holding a cup of coffee in front of their face, so the face gets detected by the system, but then there’s a nice hot cup of coffee at the end. So the system creates an alarm measuring sort of, you know, 60 or 70 degrees or some other lethal temperature.”

This highlights the importance of the facial recognition technology, and making sure the system can locate someone’s eyes.

More Clarity Needed

Althoughtechnology is a key part in our response to COVID19, Rob says more clarity on its place within that response is needed. “I think there’s in other countries as perhaps a little bit more clarity about the role this technology plays in the particularly in the aviation sector of screening passengers. But we haven’t quite got that a lot of clarity in the UK yet about what the role of it is, and how it fits into an integrated sort of COVID19 management model.”

Rob says thatit needs to fit into a risk reduction model that is considers everything from mask wearing, and social distancing, to how you change the air. In the future Rob predicts that the systems will be integrated into the wider security system of airports. “And the reason I think we believe that is that, whilst we all desperately hope that we can stop worrying about COVID19, that In a couple of years’ time, there will be a vaccine, there’s still gonna be things like seasonal flu.”

Over the past 20 years other viruses such as SARS, MERS, swine flu, avian flu, have all affected people around the world. “If we expect these things to continue to crop up every five to 10 years, and then there’s going to be seasonal, potentially seasonal flu outbreaks to deal with, then you could imagine these cameras, you know, have an engineering role in the airport infrastructure.”

This is what happened in Asia after SARS. “When I reflect on Hong Kong, for example, following SARS[IP2] , they kept their elevated temperature screening cameras in their airports,” says Fiona “So when we actually went into this pandemic of COVID, they were already prepared as they had that thermal imaging technology.”

The same could be done in British airports enabling us to better weather future pandemics.