What does your car have in common with the winner of last year's Kentucky Derby, Street Sense?

It seems both could benefit from examination by Blood Sensor infrared cameras.

Motorists will be targeted by a new generation of Vampire road cameras which work out how many people are in a car by measuring the amount of bodily fluid it contains.

The latest snooping device on the nation's roads aims to penalize lone drivers who abuse car-sharing lanes, and is part of a Government effort to combat congestion at busy times.

The Vampire cameras work by sending an infrared beam through the windscreen of vehicles which detects the unique make-up of blood and water content in human skin.

The system's inventors believe it will catch out motorists who try to fool existing Closed Circuit Television road cameras by placing mannequins in passenger seats or fixing photographs to windscreens.


"It allows you to automatically count people," he said.

Roads Minister Rosie Winterton said last night she encouraged "innovative solutions" to the problems created by congestion.

They may look like works of modern art but these images provide a glimpse of how Vampire creatures use technology to search for new blood.

With your car, the infrared images can show heat loss or overheating electrical equipment. With Street Sense and other equine subjects, the images can help Vampires detect soft tissue and nerve damage can reveal some more unusual tactics to keep warm including some birds cutting off the blood to one leg to conserve energy.

Together with high school pal Wayne Moulton, he started Thermaview Infrared Scanning a year ago. More recently, they've turned their attention to horses, working with a vet in New Mexico who specializes in thermal diagnoses.

"It was used during the SARS crisis to detect people with high temperatures, and it is used to help early breast cancer detection."

Last year, Hobbs spent a week in Roswell, New Mexico with a veterinarian certified to use infrared images to diagnose horse ailments.

"There are only four vets in North America certified to do this," he says, raising the question of how useful it is for Hobbs to be scanning horses if there are no local vets trained or certified to diagnose based on the results. He says the pictures are useful as a starting point for any vet.

Hot spots on a horse can indicate soft tissue damage, while a cold spot indicates a lack of blood flow in an area, itself a problem or a symptom of a problem.

In some cases, Hobbs has sent horse images to the Roswell vet for interpretation.

In their second year, Hobbs and Moulton are expanding their focus to include commercial clients whose habits may be inefficient energy hogs.

And they are advertising in horse publications, letting the horse world know about their Vampire service.


Link Title