Virginia District Installs Temperature Check, Video Systems on Buses

Video surveillance solutions provider Gatekeeper Systems Inc. has received purchase orders from a school district in Virginia to equip their school bus fleet with the company’s temperature check and video camera systems.

Warren County Public Schools will install Gatekeeper’s recently launched Intelligent Temperature Sensing Systems (ITSS) and video camera systems on approximately 50 of its school buses, Katie Wilson, Gatekeeper’s southeast regional manager, told School Bus Fleet.

Wilson said that installation for both systems will begin in November and is expected to be completed by December.

“I am impressed with the accuracy and speed of Gatekeeper’s Intelligent Temperature Sensing System,” Aaron Mitchell, transportation director at Warren County Public Schools, told SBF. “The system is user friendly and easy for our students to understand.”

ITSS is a contactless system that can determine body temperature within 20 milliseconds using thermal cameras, artificial intelligence, and video analytics, according to a news release from Gatekeeper. Visual and audible alarms are triggered when temperature thresholds are exceeded. When passengers board a bus, the ITSS panel records body temperature with an accuracy of +/- 0.5 degree Celsius. The seven-inch ITSS panel is equipped with facial recognition capabilities to improve accuracy and allows users to pursue future applications such as intelligent passenger routing, contact tracing, passenger counting, or payment verification, according to the video surveillance systems supplier. The panel also records images within 40 milliseconds and has storage capacity of 50,000 facial images.

"This is an example of how Gatekeeper is helping our long-term school district customers in their fight against COVID-19,” said Doug Dyment, CEO of Gatekeeper. “Our ITSS system performs a rapid, contactless, temperature check as the student boards the school bus. If they have a fever and are denied entry, the school district can then quickly turn to our video analytics software to determine who the student has been sitting nearby during the bus rides in previous days.”

Gatekeeper's video analytics solution records video evidence within the school bus allowing school districts the ability to analyze the video, clip the video, and facial blur images for emailing and efficient contact tracing, according to the company.

Over the past seven years, Gatekeeper has reportedly equipped approximately 28,000 school buses, transit buses, and trains with 97,000 video devices and intelligent mobile data collectors.