Raspberry Pi devices are often used by scientists, especially for capturing and analyzing biological data. A particularly noteworthy sober project has published news this week.
According to the researchers at UMass Amherst, FluSense is about the size of a dictionary. Includes an inexpensive microphone set, heat sensor, Raspberry Pi and Intel Movidius 2 neural engine. The idea is to use AI on the edge to classify audio samples and determine the number of people in a room at any given time.
Image courtesy of the University of Massachusetts Amherst
We believe that FluSense has the potential to expand the arsenal of health surveillance tools used to forecast seasonal flu and other viral respiratory outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or SARS,” Rahman told TechCrunch. “By understanding the ebb and flow of the symptoms dynamics across different locations, we can have a better understanding of the severity of a novel infectious disease and that way we can enforce targeted public health intervention such as social distancing or vaccination.
Source: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3534101/covid-19-vs-raspberry-pi-researchers-bring-iot-technology-to-disease-detection.html
Crowd monitoring with Raspberry Pi
The device distinguishes cough from other sounds. By combining cough data with information about the size of the crowd at your location, you can get an index that predicts the number of people who may be experiencing flu symptoms.
Currently we are planning to deploy the FluSense system in several large public spaces (e.g., large cafeteria, classroom, dormitories, gymnasium, auditorium) to capture syndromic signals from a broad range of people who live in a certain town or city,” they said. “We are also looking for funding to run a large-scale multi-city trial. In the meantime, we are also diversifying our sensing capability by extending FluSense’s capability to capture more syndromic signals (e.g., recently we added sneeze sensing capability to FluSense). We definitely see a significant level of commercialization potential in this line of research.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/flusense-takes-on-covid-19-with-raspberry-pi/
