Personalizing elderly care with intelligent technology
Happy Memories Senior Care monitors elderly residents’ welfare with Axis cameras and Voxela analytic software. Elderly care technology improves resident life, alerting staff to restless sleep, nighttime bed exits, fall risks, and more.
Providing residential care for older adults
Happy Memories Senior Care, nestled in the foothills of Folsom, California, is a small residential care facility for the elderly. In addition to six private bedrooms overlooking gardens and orchards, Happy Memories provides residents with nutritious daily meals, housekeeping and laundry services, and assistance with daily living activities such as personal grooming and medication management, as well as social and recreational opportunities.
Once our residents and their families understood that the technology wasn’t there to spy on them, but rather a tool to help us provide a safe environment for their loved ones, they quickly came on board.
Balancing bedroom safety with resident privacy
“We have caregiving staff on the premises 24 hours a day to see to our residents’ needs,” explains Solomon Chis, owner and operator of Happy Memories Senior Care. “But when our residents retire to their rooms, we have to balance their need for privacy with our need to ensure their health and safety.”
Initially, Chis installed sensor mats in each bedroom — on the floor, on the bed, and on the recliner. When one of the mats sensed pressure, it would send an alert to the caretakers on duty that movement had been detected in a resident’s room.
“Not knowing what triggered the alarm — a blanket landing on the floor or a resident falling out of bed — led to a lot of interrupted sleep and needless intrusion,” shares Chis. “We’d go investigate only to find that the resident had been sound asleep, but now we’d woken them up.”
Clearly these simple reactive alerts were proving problematic. What they needed instead was a tool that could interpret what was really happening in each bedroom and deliver meaningful information instead of false alarms, while still striking the right balance between safety and privacy.
Monitoring elderly health and safety a smarter way
When a friend told Chis about the VCare system from Voxela, he knew he had found the solution. “VCare gives us a way to protect the health of our residents without compromising the personal privacy they deserve in their own rooms,” maintains Chis.
The VCare solution integrates intelligent software, developed by Voxela using the AXIS Camera Application Platform (ACAP), directly into a compact Axis box camera. “We put a camera in each resident’s bedroom to monitor and identify their actions in real time,” describes Goutham Kamath, cofounder and chief technology officer for Voxela.
“The AI software we designed ascertains whether the action requires attention — like a resident falling on the floor or struggling to get up from a chair — and if so, sends an alert to the app on the caregiver’s smartphone along with a video clip of what’s happening.”
“Once our residents and their families understood that the technology wasn’t there to spy on them, but rather a tool to help us provide a safe environment for their loved ones, they quickly came on board,” reports Solomon Chis.
Setting privacy levels based on resident risk
Because observation is managed through intelligent software, Voxela
is able to program the privacy settings on each bedroom camera
depending on the health issues of the individual resident.
These privacy settings include:
- Level of video blurring based on a resident’s health risks
- Timing of caretaker access to live viewing cameras
- Length of video archived for analyzing root cause of issues
Before setting these parameters, Chis collaborates with the residents and their families to make sure Happy Memories respects each resident’s need for privacy without risking their health and safety. For instance, Chis may minimize or eliminate the video blur for a resident with dementia because they’re more prone to experiencing falls and may no longer understand how to use their emergency button.
In keeping with HIPAA concerns, the VCare system also protects residents’ personal information by capturing and storing video and analytics by room number rather than resident name. “What makes the solution so perfect for us is that it gives us the flexibility to deliver timely, customized care to our residents while protecting both their safety and their dignity,” asserts Chis.
Using analytics to reveal health issues
While watching over residents in their bedrooms, VCare analyzes patterns in movement and behavior over time to identify individuals who are at a higher risk of falling. “It’s amazing how VCare can recognize early warning signs, like unsteady movements or frequent tripping, and alert our caregivers in real time so they can step in before a fall happens,” shares Chis.
In addition to anticipating falls, the elderly care technology tracks each resident’s behavior and activity patterns to reveal health issues that might otherwise have gone undetected. The reports provide Happy Memories with insights into whether individual residents have restless sleep patterns, frequent nighttime visits to the bathroom, instability getting in and out of their bed or chair, and so forth.
Providing concrete data to family doctors
When medical issues are evident, Happy Memories shares that VCare analysis with a resident’s personal physician. “The restless sleep pattern of one resident led us to believe that their pain medication wasn’t enough to help them sleep through the night,” states Chis. “So with the family’s consent, we shared the data with their family physician, who then adjusted the prescription to increase the nightly dosage.”
When Chis saw from the report and video that a particular resident had been going to the bathroom more frequently at night, he suspected the person had a urinary tract infection (UTI) and contacted the resident’s personal physician. Upon examination, the doctor confirmed the diagnosis and prescribed treatment.
“Over time, the VCare system gets to know the activity level of each resident,” says Goutham Kamath. “We can see if someone is stable, declining, or improving and share that analysis with Happy Memories. This kind of detailed analysis helps Happy Memories tailor individual care and ensure their elderly residents maintain a high quality of life.”
Raising the bar for elderly care with smart technology
By turning everyday observations into meaningful insights, the Axis-Voxela elderly care solution gives Chis and his facility’s caregivers exactly what they need: the clarity to act on situations that matter without compromising the dignity and privacy of his residents.
“As an elderly care facility, it’s our job to provide a good, safe environment for our residents,” asserts Chis. “With the Axis-Voxela solution, we’re better able to monitor their well-being while giving them the independence and privacy they need.”
Chis has been encouraging other residential care facility owners in his area to adopt the solution and already plans to install the technology in his second Happy Memories Senior Care property.
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