Gadgets to hunker down with as we fight coronavirus

From smart thermometers to touch-free taps, these gadgets can help you hunker down at home.

Withings Thermo digital thermometer.

These gadgets can help you as we hunker down at home to keep coronavirus at bay. Even relatively cheap devices can make a difference. Here are four.

Withings Thermo ($179, JB Hi-Fi, withings.com)

Taking your temperature daily is an important way of picking up evidence of a fever and possibly coronavirus. If you have a larger family, keeping tabs on everyone’s temperature can be complex. Do you continually wash thermometers as you check each person? Do they have individual thermometers?

French consumer tech firm Withings has a Rolls-Royce solution, a Wi-Fi connected temporal artery thermometer that takes eight people’s temperatures without touching their skin. Withings says this is achieved with a 16-sensor array. You simply hold the thermometer near a person’s forehead.

The thermometer can be customised for each family member. Picture: Supplied

Withings says measurements are fast and accurate.

You can upload temperatures for each person to a dedicated app, track individual temperatures and forward them to a health professional by email if necessary. It’s powered by two AAA batteries that last up to two years.

Xiaomi Touchless Water Sensor ($34.54, au.banggood.com)

This will help you keep your hands virus free. The gadget fits on the end of your tap and lets you turn the water flow on and off using hand gestures. You don’t have to touch a tap.

The problem is that if you turn a tap on to clean your hands and leave germs or a virus on it, your newly cleaned hands might be re-contaminated when you turn the tap off. Hands free operation avoids this.

The Xiaomi Touchless Faucet Sensor. Picture: Supplied

The device has two sensing areas. Waving your hand past a sensor on the side turns a continuous flow on and off. There’s two water modes, and 0.25 second fast induction.

You get six sets of adaptors for different tap circumferences. The edge of your tap needs to be a plain tube. The device uses infra-red sensing and you can charge it by USB.

You can buy taps with in-built sensors, but they cost much more.

Facebook Portal TV ($150, Facebook.com)

Portal TV enables Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp video calls on your TV. It looks like a miniature sound bar and connects to your TV using an HDMI cable.

Talking to your grandmother, spouse, children and friends with their faces on your big living room TV offers a sense of visual and emotional connectedness, which is important if home in quarantine or self isolation.

There are plenty of options, such as Skype, Google Duo and Apple FaceTime.

Facebook Portal TV enables high definition video calls on Messenger and WhatsApp on the big screen.

However, almost everyone I know uses Facebook or WhatsApp, which means I can easily chat to them with Portal TV. You can grab a coffee, sit on the sofa, relax and talk for hours.

Portal TV has a wide angle camera that keeps you in the frame if you start walking around the room. You can physically cover the camera and mute the microphone if you worry about privacy. Earlier story.

Kogan N300 4G LTE CAT4 Modem & Wireless Router ($129, Kogan.com)

Kogan’s modem and wireless router. Picture: Supplied

You’ll need functioning broadband for working at home or for your kids to learn online. Coronavirus might stress test the NBN’s capacity with so much of the population at home.

There are good portents. NBN Co says it will let retailers order up to 40 per cent extra capacity for customers over the next three months but pay at February rates. That means faster internet.

However if your NBN is a basket case, you could now face difficulty getting it fixed.

You can buy a mobile router, add a SIM, and connect your devices to that. There are some great options. Netgear mobile routers are particularly reliable. But you might want an inexpensive one for a few months’ use.

Online retailer Kogan sells its own branded Kogan BN300 4G LTE CAT4 modem and wireless router for $129. It’s not the fastest mobile modem around like ones produced by Netgear but it’s pretty fast with wireless N speeds of up to 300 megabits per second, and relatively inexpensive if you just want short term use. It supports LTE CAT4 download speeds of 150Mbps, supports up to 32 users, and has two ethernet ports for cable connections.

You can use this modem when you really need fast internet for working or when your kids are watching video lessons. You can use your regular broadband for the rest.

Kogan offers some competitive data-only plans such as 30GB for $50 over 30 days.

Telstra, Optus and Boost are offering free extra data due to the pandemic and that extends to data only plans. Check their sites for details and conditions.