(from left) Nadiya Azka, Anadya Ghina Salsabila, and Michelle Casey receiving the 1st place award in the ICT KTI field at the XVII 2024 Gemastik competition held at Semarang State University (Unnes)

ITS Campus, ITS News — Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) has once again shown its contribution to the development of technology in the health sector. This time, an ITS student team called We CAN has successfully initiated a health application called VisMoIR, a non-contact vital signs detection application that utilizes infrared light as its source of information.

We CAN team leader Anadya Ghina Salsabila revealed that the background of this innovation is to help detect vital signs. Such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and body temperature which often cannot be done comprehensively due to limited resources and time.

Departing from this problem, the woman who is familiarly called Nadya and her two colleagues innovated a thermal imaging application to detect body vitals. The application is in the form of a thermal imaging camera that can detect infrared radiation from an object. Furthermore, the radiation is converted into temperature and visualized in the form of a thermal image. “This camera can detect changes in body temperature in real time,” she explained.

VisMoIR application user interface (GUI), a non-contact vital sign detection system using infrared radiation

The way this innovation works has several stages, namely data acquisition, Region of Interest (ROI) detection, signal extraction, and adaptive spatio-temporal filtering, as well as vital sign detection. The Biomedical Engineering Department student explained that the data acquisition process was carried out by recording a limited thermal video on the subject’s face for 60 seconds in a room with normal temperature. Furthermore, the data in the video will be processed in the ROI process.

Furthermore, Nadya explained that there are two types of ROI that are detected, namely facial ROI to detect body temperature and heart rate, and nasal ROI to detect respiratory rate. Facial ROI is detected by separating the facial area from the background noise in the thermal image. After that, a temperature conversion is carried out in each pixel to detect body temperature, especially in the area inside the eye. “This area was chosen because it is often used as a reference for body temperature,” he explained.

Meanwhile, nasal ROI detection is carried out with the help of the Haar Cascade algorithm. This algorithm works by focusing detection on the nose area with the help of the Region of Measurement (ROM), especially the nostrils. After the ROM area is detected, signal extraction is carried out according to the parameter values ​​in the system. The results of the nose ROI and face ROI will be converted into a heart rate signal that is plotted against time units.

One of the participants during a trial of the VisMoIR thermal imaging camera, an innovative idea from the ITS student team.

Nadya added that to maximize the performance of the camera, a new algorithm was also developed, namely adaptive spatio-temporal filtering. This algorithm is a signal processing method to improve image and video quality by eliminating unwanted noise. This algorithm is then integrated with XGBoost machine learning in processing data for each vital sign.

Based on the test results, Nadya explained that the accuracy level of this camera showed a high percentage of numbers. Namely for body temperature reaching 99.57 percent, respiratory rate 95.35 percent, and heart rate 98.71 percent of the Complement of The Absolute Normalized Difference (CAND) index. This high accuracy indicates the great potential of thermal cameras to be an effective health screening tool.

The WE CAN team, which also consists of Nadiya Azka and Michelle Casey, has won a gold medal at the 2024 Gemastik XVII in the Scientific Paper (KTI) category, some time ago. “Hopefully, this innovation can be useful in the health sector, especially in increasing the efficiency of health services,” concluded the 2020 student hopefully. (ITS PUBLIC RELATIONS)

Reporter: Khaila Bening Amanda Putri