Nokia has created an automated system that uses a thermal camera and real-time video analytics to determine if a person has Covid-19 symptoms and is wearing a mask, part of efforts to protect employees as they return to work.

The Finnish company has been using the system in its factory in Chennai, India, for two months and has screened more than 200,000 people in that facility.

The factory, which was closed for some time to comply with Indian regulations following the coronavirus outbreak, has more than 1,000 employees.

The system detects whether a person has a high temperature or is not wearing their face-mask and alerts the operation centre, the head of Analytics and IoT for Nokia, Amit Shah, told Reuters.

It comes with its privacy settings where faces can be blurred to comply with local regulations and deployed across different locations and monitored from a central facility without the need to keep a person at every check point.

"Nokia factories and R&D centres are deploying this," Shah said, adding that talks were also at "pretty advanced stages" on deploying the system in North America, Latin America and Asia and across sectors including schools and government buildings.

Nokia said customers could expand the product to add other features, including predictive surveillance, machine maintenance and security threats.

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