A SARAWAK academic has designed a novel system to spare nurses and doctors the tedious – and life-threatening – work of taking the temperature of Covid-19 patients.

Sarawak Swinburne University’s Patrick Then and his team – a fellow lecturer and a postgraduate student – took just three months to develop the system.

It is now reportedly being used at Sarawak General Hospital in Kuching and some of the state’s quarantine centres.

The heart of the system is a 6cm x 4cm S-shaped temperature patch manufactured in the US.

While the patch is imported, Then and his team are behind the technological set-up of the system and its network, which allow doctors and nurses handling contagious patients to monitor their temperature without having to go near them.

He described the patch as similar to “koyok”, a medicated plaster popular with Malaysians to treat body aches and muscle pain.

The patch is certified for public use by both the US Food and Drug Administration and European Economic Area’s (EEA) European Conformity (CE).

The CE certifies conformity with health, safety and environmental protection standards for products sold within EEA.

How it works

The patch is attached to a patient’s armpit and remains there until they are discharged from hospital.

It does not come with troublesome wiring, and is instead bristled with micro-sensors and a transmitter that takes a patient’s body temperature every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day.

Through an app, the patch transmits via Bluetooth the temperature readings to a cloud server, which doctors and nurses can monitor through a dashboard.

The system also sends out alerts when a patient’s temperature rises above the threshold.

“It discards the old ways of reading a patient’s temperature,” said Then.

A new system

He said the system reduces the risk of exposure for nurses and doctors handling Covid-19 patients.

Then said the idea of a remote-sensing system came to him after reading news of the outbreak in the virus ground zero of Wuhan.

“It gave me the idea of the need to take people’s temperature from a safe distance.

“We saw that in this kind of pandemic, taking people’s temperature is an important part of treatment.”

By early February, Then and his team were already hard at work on the system, long before the government announced the movement-control order (MCO) in mid-March to curb virus transmissions.

“Originally, the idea was to have the system deployed in infected countries, which, at that time, was China.

“We never expected the pandemic to come to our doorstep. So, we were able deploy it here at home instead.”

The patches were delivered to Sarawak General Hospital for a trial and tests earlier this month. Then said they are now “fully confident for large-scale deployment”.

State Housing and Local Government Minister Dr Sim Hui Kian has lauded the spirit and “extraordinary effort” of Then and his team in fighting the pandemic.

“This (embodies) the very spirit, the solidarity and the extraordinary effort that all Sarawakians come together to fight the Covid-19 pandemic,” Dr Sim, a senior adviser in the state Disaster Management Committee, said in a Facebook post recently.

Malaysia recorded only 54 new Covid-19 infections yesterday, the lowest since the MCO began and the second consecutive day the number remained in double digits.

Recoveries continued to exceed new cases, at 135, bringing the number of patients who have been discharged to 3,102, or 58.5% of total cases.

“The new infections reported in the last 24 hours take the number of coronavirus cases in the country to 5,305,” said Director-General of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah yesterday.

He said 49 patients are in the intensive care unit with 26 on respirators.

Another two people died of the virus, bringing the total number of fatalities in the country to 88. – April 19, 2020.