The hospitalEnvironment and cleanliness
CAM-122
Wet floor in the hallway
A unit hallway in mid-afternoon. There’s a wet stretch of floor, shiny, taking up half the width of the passage, and not a single sign has been put out. Against the left-hand wall, a supply cart, stacked boxes and a linen bag; on the right, a waste container. A member of staff is walking right along the edge of it. IRIS can see the floor is wet; what has been spilt, it doesn’t know.
Turn on IRIS Vision
AI-generated image
What IRIS understands
What it recognizes in this scene
- wet floor
- member of staff walking along the edge
- supply cart
- boxes stacked in the way
- waste container
What this camera measures
An alert says something’s happening. The reading says how much.
- 9 minWet for
- 7People who have walked over it
- 1People on that stretch right now
- 0Wet-floor signs put out
- 6Carts and items left in the hallway
- 15:24Time of the alert
The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client’s measurement.
The rule
You decide once. IRIS applies it always.
If
a wet stretch of floor appears in a hallway and is still there after the time the hospital has set
Then
- alert the unit sister with the camera, the stretch of floor and how long it has been like that
- ask for someone to sign it, dry it and check what it is before touching it
- log the time and the spot, so the unit learns which hallways get wet and when
The instruction that set it up«Tell me when something gets spilt on a hallway floor and is still there with no sign out, and tell me which camera and since when.»
What changes
What changes for whoever runs the unit
Nobody deals with a wet hallway floor because nobody has seen it: whoever walks past is on their way to something else and assumes it has already been reported. Today the unit finds out when somebody calls, and very often the person calling is the one who has just slipped. With IRIS the alert goes out on its own, with the camera, the stretch of floor and how long it’s been there, and it reaches somebody who can send a person to sign it and dry it. Nobody is promising this stops anyone falling: the one who acts is still a person. What changes is that the puddle stops sitting there for nine minutes with nobody knowing.
What people usually ask
Does IRIS know what has been spilt?
No, and saying otherwise would be a lie. IRIS sees that there’s a wet patch on the floor and sees where it starts and where it ends. It could be water from a machine, a coffee, a glass of juice or something the hospital has a protocol for, and from a hallway camera those four look much the same. What it’s gets decided by the person who arrives, not by the camera. The alert is there so that person arrives sooner, not to classify the liquid.
Does the camera identify the people walking down the hallway?
No. IRIS does not identify anyone: it does not recognize faces, it does not compare them against any database, it does not know who any patient or member of staff is, it holds no record of anybody and it does not touch the clinical record. It counts how many people have walked over the wet stretch because that’s a number, and a number isn’t a name.
What if it’s a splash and the alert fires anyway?
The size at which it alerts and how long it has to have been there are set by the hospital, and they can differ between a unit hallway and the entrance hall. You tune them until the alert means something. If it fires on every splash, the unit sister stops opening it within a week, and then it’s worth nothing at all.
The real interface, step by step
Watch what happens. Then watch what IRIS does with it.
Not a recorded video and not a drawing: it’s a summary of the real tool, with a different case each time round. The whole tool doesn’t fit in a box.
- The hour, as a grid
- You look where it’s dark
- You jump to that minute
Next step
And who watches the cameras?
34 cases, and in every one of them IRIS raises an alert when something happens. You see each image as it is, and then with what it understands on top.
Who watches the cameras of a whole city?
23 cases: 18 raise an alert when something happens and 5 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
And the best part
You can’t describe a line with a sentence.You have to draw it on the image.
Asking is for finding. Counting is for measuring. And they aren’t done the same way. That’s why the number comes out the same every day, and why people counting is approved by the Centro Español de Metrología — Spain’s national metrology institute. It’s a Spanish approval and it isn’t equivalent to any U.S. certification.
Tell us your problem and we’ll say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
A person answers, the same working day.