How does the world view thermal imaging technology?
Our methodology – what data we used and how we analysed it
Our source primarily came from news articles and general information about the implementation of thermal imaging cameras around the world.
We’ve collected and analysed over 400 articles available to the public. The start point was when the pandemic started until what was recently available.
For each article on the page, we extracted all the paragraphs. With this, we utilised the langdetect Python library in order to detect the language of the first paragraph of the article. If the language was other than English, the text was translated through the article body by directly scraping Google Translate.
We then performed the sentiment analysis of each article in each region. For the sentiment analysis, we used the TextBlob library in order to compute the polarity of each sentence of each article and calculated the average sentiment polarity per article. We illustrated the average sentiment polarities of the articles in each region in a violin plot.
How has the world looked at thermal cameras as a way to combat the COVID-19 pandemic?
Without a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a lot of hardship around the world. Governments around the world have looked at a plethora of ways to combat the virus, such as multiple tiers of national and local lockdowns, quarantine, facemasks and social distancing.
Technology has also been heavily integrated into combating the virus to help people adapt to their homes, workplaces and in the public. Yet, it is clear that much of what we’ve learnt or experienced in this pandemic is that we’re far from the normality we had before the pandemic.
New technologies and attitudes will be a part of many people’s lives, such as WFH (work from home), remote meetings such as Zoom and the increase of deliveries from Amazon and similar services.
Travelling has also been affected, and different rules are applied to each country, yet those procedures are most likely not far from each other, and the same technology is applied.
One of those technologies is thermal cameras, and although the height of the pandemic has passed, it is worth investigating the value thermal cameras have provided in the post-pandemic period and what it could mean in the future.
Governments around the world and companies have looked at thermal cameras to help ease the spread of the virus whilst providing a sense of security for travellers, commuters and shoppers.
