Dutch company Kepler Vision Technologies has announced a software upgrade for its Kepler Night Nurse (KNN) system.
Thanks to the upgrade, the faces of anyone detected by its smart sensor system will be blurred, thus providing an additional level of privacy for both care home residents and staff.
KNN is already able to detect when patients fall, or when they are in physical distress, or when residents suffering from dementia wander into off-limits areas. Staff are automatically alerted when their assistance is required, eliminating, Kepler claims, 99 per cent of false alarms.
The addition of automatic face blurring to KNN adds an extra level of privacy for anyone present in these environments, similar to the automatic anonymisation used by Google Maps.
Dr Harro Stokman, Kepler CEO, said: “As machine learning tools continue to proliferate throughout the healthcare sector, ensuring these systems provide benefits without compromising patient’s privacy and dignity is of paramount importance. While our [KNN] system already provides privacy because the video feeds it monitors are only ever ‘seen’ by the algorithm, automatically blurring the faces in this closed system will provide an extra level of privacy for both patients, and staff who are concerned that KNN could be used to spy on them.”
