Thermal imaging as a smartphone application: exploring and implementing a new concept

Today's world is going mobile. Smartphone devices have become an important part of everyday life for billions of people around the globe. Thermal imaging cameras have been around for half a century and are now making their way into our daily lives. Originally built for military applications, thermal cameras are starting to be considered for personal use, enabling enhanced vision and temperature mapping for different groups of professional individuals. Through a revolutionary concept that turns smartphones into fully functional thermal cameras, we have explored how these two worlds can converge by utilizing the best of each technology. We will present the thought process, design considerations and outcome of our development process, resulting in a lowpower, high resolution, lightweight USB thermal imaging device that turns Android smartphones into thermal cameras. We will discuss the tecluiological challenges that we faced during the development of the product, and what are the system design decisions taken during the implementation. We will provide some insights we came across during this development process. Finally, we will discuss the opportunities that this innovative technology brings to the market.