Infrared Tech Help stop the spread of COVID-19
As the Covid-19 pandemic drags on, we continue to struggle with how to live with the virus. One of the biggest challenges has been detection. The fastest test can return results in about 15 minutes, but in some cases, it can take up to a week. And some parts of the U.S. still lack the necessary testing capacity. I don't think there is a perfect screening mechanism to doing it unless you're actually testing for the virus at these points of entry, which we do not currently as a nation have the resources to do. As stores, restaurants, and offices start to reopen, they have turned to infrared technology to help identify one of the virus's primary symptoms. Having a fever is definitely a red flag that you have it. Thermal cameras are nothing new.
They actually were used similarly during the outbreaks of SARS, MERS, and H1N1. Previous outbreaks impacted Asia-Pacific and so they gravitated towards thermal imaging technologies. Because the reach of Covid-19 was global, now we're seeing adoption in other parts of the globe. For essential companies and workers who continue to operate during the pandemic, infrared cameras have been one line of defense in keeping people safe. Imagine you're a mask factory. You're going to get a camera in there. They've got to protect their people. We have to protect our people. We have cameras in our own factory. We have to can continue to consider what it means to die from this virus. But we also have to have a conversation about how are we going to live with it? And we have to figure that out. Demand for infrared technology is at an all-time high. The infrared camera market is expected to grow to ten billion dollars by 2026, up from six billion in 2019. We believe in thermal camera technology as a frontline screening tool and the key role they can play in helping us all get back to whatever new normal we're headed towards. Infrared is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Falling within the 700 nanometers to the one-millimeter range.
This sits just outside the visible spectrum. So we can't see it, but we can detect it as heat. More than half of the total energy from the sun reaches Earth in the form of infrared and all living things emit varying degrees of infrared radiation. Pretty much everything is giving off a heat signature, anything above absolute zero. The body cools itself down by emitting this heat light, and that's called long-wave infrared radiation. While current demand is being driven by contactless thermometers and temperature screening devices, infrared technology has many applications. Aside from allowing you to use your television remote, infrared is prominent in industrial settings. You're looking for hotspots that might indicate fatigue or wear and mechanical or electromechanical applications. It's also popular with the military, firefighters, search and rescue, and astronomy. We can actually calibrate cameras up to 3000 C, which is almost 6000 degrees Fahrenheit to measure the temperature of NASA's latest nuclear electric engine.
FLIR's thermal cameras are used in the military and government spaces where it's used to create situational awareness, you can see with infrared at night or day. Infrared scanners were widely used to try and slow the spread of SARS in China in the early 2000s and curb the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a decade later. If you talk literally to the people in South Africa, in Nigeria and in Sierra Leone and Liberia, they credit the cameras and the thermal imaging systems that we put in the airports there from keeping the virus contained. While it's a useful tool. Medical professionals still generally rely on traditional means to take a patient's temperature. When it comes down to, I really need to know your temperature to make important decisions, I have to get what's called a core temperature. Those are the uncomfortable temperatures. Right. So that would be the ones that have to go inserted into your body somehow. The advantage of contactless thermometers is its ability to provide a temperature estimate quickly and from a distance. We can measure a very accurate temperature from five feet away, six feet away, even 15 feet away. The biggest advantage of this is that it's really fast, it's a 2D image of temperature that can not be done with any other technology. Contactless thermometers measure the surface temperature of our skin.
The best region to scan is around the eyes. We know that the best correlation to core body temperature is really the tear duct and so when we focus our measurement for that area, we're able to get pretty accurate correlation to core body temperature. With the inability to identify coronavirus outside a test febrile screening has become one of the only methods to quickly spot those who may be exhibiting symptoms of the virus. When you run a fever, your blood vessels dilate and you give off more energy. If you're really warm, it's obvious. I mean, you stick out like a sore thumb. Thermal cameras are already widespread in Asia. China has been using them to help since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. If you go to China, they're everywhere. And there are lots of Asian countries where the cameras are mounted all over the airports. We saw a spike in demand in the Asia-Pacific region in early Q1. So January, February timeframe.
The U.S. has been slow to adopt the technology, but that is quickly changing. In July, Hawaii added infrared cameras to its airports. LAX and JFK are testing thermal cameras, and Canada has already mandated temperature checks in airports. There's a camera at Payne Airport in Seattle. We installed three cameras at Love Field. We have two cameras at Southwest Airlines headquarters. The TSA is doing testing with multiple systems out there to actually look at deploying this. Companies like Amazon have placed big orders for thermal cameras. It bought $10 million worth from a Chinese firm that's actually on the U.S. blacklist. Ford Motor Company deployed more than 380 infrared thermal scanners to its facilities. Vodafone is deploying cameras made by surveillance tech company Digital Barriers. They also will be used by the Venetians in Las Vegas, the PGA Golf Tour and the Baltimore Ravens training facility, to name a few. What once was a small, niche industry has suddenly been overwhelmed with demand. In places like China, prices for these devices has spiked three to five times. One of the largest thermal device manufacturers is FLIR Systems. FLIR makes cameras all the way from a very low cost, a couple of hundred dollars that plugs into a mobile device all the way up to really expensive solutions that might mount to an aircraft or be in military use. China's largest infrared tech company, Wuhan Guide Infrared Co., has been working around the clock in the epicenter of the pandemic.
It typically only sells about 100 devices a year but has halted production of everything but temperature scanners to keep up. Texas-based infrared Cameras Inc. is another infrared device manufacturer. Our focus is on trying to develop systems and get the price of the systems down to where we can build something really great and really accurate. ICI has provided cameras for companies like Amazon, Southwest, and FedEx. If you're like FedEx in Memphis and you're moving 10,000 people in there on a night shift through 10doors, you're going to stand a system up at every door to measure those thousand people as they come through each door. It also has been setting them up at schools as students begin to return. But the accuracy of contactless thermometers has been called into question. These devices measure the skin surface temperature and are susceptible to inaccurate readings.
Environmental factors can play a part in skewing your reading, as well as user error. It always gives me a fairly low temperature. And this is me walking across a hot parking lot in North Carolina before I get my temperature done. The forehead's very susceptible to environmental impact. So if I'm outdoors and I come inside, maybe I was even wearing a hat, I might have a hot forehead and it gives you a false positive. The effectiveness depends on the device. Single point systems and those scanning large crowds are not as accurate. ICI says its devices are accurate within a tenth of a degree. There's a lot of systems that are being sold out there that are single-point systems. Not all of these devices are great. Systems that are trying to look out into a crowd of people at varying focus's and distances and maybe looking at foreheads that are less accurate. And we really haven't seen data that shows that they work effectively as a frontline screening tool. But not all contactless thermometers are created equal. There's really a lack of education about the equipment that people are buying out there.
The market is flooded with low-cost systems that have no FDA clearance that is pouring in here from China. Non-contact temperature devices used in medical environments had to meet FDA certifications. There's only a handful of companies in the United States that actually make infrared medical devices. Well, now it's a huge market. But in April, the administration said it wouldn't block products anymore to increase availability. All these people, people with zero experience in manufacturing any kind of infrared device, they'rebuying sensors that are putting stuff together. There's pressure federally to get more systems out there. On the other hand, now we need to make sure that people work in compliance with all this stuff. So it's a very precarious and difficult situation. Perhaps the biggest issue with thermal imaging as a screening tool is the variation in symptoms. Not everyone with Covid-19 exhibits offers and some don't have any symptoms at all. Twenty-five to forty-five percent of the people who I have positive COVID testing the emergency room were asymptomatic entirely. But experts agree it's better than nothing. It's probably going to miss some people. But on the other hand, again, as a clinician, if it is picking up people going to work or going into places with fevers who otherwise would not have been picked up, it probably has some utility. You don't want false positives, but you certainly don't want false negatives. False negatives mean you're letting someone that's febrile or that has a fever into the facility. There are also privacy issues. Civil liberty advocates are concerned about the influx of cameras that will be popping up.FLIR's elevated skin temperature solutions don't record or save any personalized data. Infrared is not only for detecting fevers.
It could actually help in the fight against the virus. Researchers have been studying how radiation from red and near-infrared light can affect the body. In the early 2000s, we published a paper and showed that near-infrared and red light combined actually accelerated the healing process of diabetic ulcers that did not respond to any other form of treatment. Near-infrared and red light has been approved for the treatment of arthritis. Researchers in Brazil are investigating the effects of this light in helping heal respiratory infections. Laboratory rats with lung fibrosis or chronic obstructive lung disease, similar to what you find in patients with Covid-19. That when their lungs are irradiated through the skin with red and near-infrared light, particularly near-infrared light, the symptoms are reduced significantly and they actually go away. While still in early stages, the could prove to be a potentially life-saving treatment for COVID-19 patients.
We need to invest in the research to really demonstrate in patient-care situations. So we are looking at a five to 10-year horizon. Other applications of infrared include things like clothing that could control the amount of infrared radiationinsulated or released by the garment. I call it smart textiles that can change the radiative heat transfer property on demand. And that can be coupled to, say, your smartphone and you can press a button and that will change your textile from heating to cooling mode and vice-versa. While the applications are still being figured out, experts agree that like with other deadly diseases in the past, infrared can be part of the solution. The world did a phenomenal job of containing Ebola. That could happen again. Look at the lives and the jobs and the impact on the economy and the deaths of loved ones. Let's put systems out there that can catch this stuff early and take the infected people and separate them from the herd. When there's an outbreak like this, it needs to be contained.
