The hospitalCustomer experience
CAM-120
A patient waiting alone in the hallway
A hospital hallway. A patient in a gown and slippers is sitting on the bench against the wall, a cannula in his hand, looking straight ahead. Beside him an empty wheelchair stands in the middle of the hallway. At the far end, the nurses’ station counter, with nobody behind it. No staff walk past. IRIS counts how long he has been there and how many people are nearby; it doesn’t know who he is or what he is waiting for.
Turn on IRIS Vision
AI-generated image
What IRIS understands
What it recognizes in this scene
- patient waiting alone
- wheelchair standing idle
- hallway bench
- empty nurses’ station
- doors to a room
What this camera measures
An alert says something’s happening. The reading says how much.
- 18 minwaiting for
- 15 minlimit set by the hospital
- 0staff who have walked past
- 0people at the station
- 1people in the hallway
- 09:37time 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
there is a person alone in a common area, with nobody else nearby, for longer than the hospital has set
Then
- alert the nurses’ station with the camera, the spot in the hallway and how long it has been
- state how many staff have walked past in that time
- keep the elapsed time, so the hospital learns in which hallways and at what hours this happens
The instruction that set it up«Tell me if a patient has been alone in a hallway for a long while, with nobody coming near them.»
What changes
What changes for whoever runs the unit
Forty minutes sitting on a bench in a hallway. He was brought down for a test, the transporter left him there and went for the next patient. There’s no incident: it’s simply that nobody knows he is still there. And the time he spends alone in a hallway is the time in which, if he gets dizzy standing up, there’s nobody in front of him. IRIS doesn’t care for anyone: it counts the time and tells the unit that at that spot there’s a person who’s been waiting longer than the hospital considers reasonable. Most of the time it will be enough for somebody to look in and tell him how much longer, and that’s exactly the point: that nobody is left forgotten in a hallway.
What people usually ask
Does IRIS know which patient this is and why he is there?
No. IRIS does not identify anyone: it does not recognize faces, it does not compare them against any database, it does not store who anyone is and it does not access any medical record or the hospital’s systems. It doesn’t know whether that person is waiting for a test, for a transporter or for their discharge. All it knows is that there’s a person sitting at that spot and how long they have been there. The rest is supplied by the team, who do have that information and do know what to do with it.
Where are there cameras, and where are there none?
These cameras look at common areas: hallways, waiting areas and lobbies. There’s no camera in any room, in any bathroom and in any examination room, nor anywhere a patient is treated or examined. The place where someone is cared for isn’t watched; the place people walk through is — and only to know that someone is waiting there and since when.
Won’t this end up giving a hundred alerts a shift?
It depends on how the rule is written, and the hospital writes it. It’s set per area and per time band: a bench in a diagnostics hallway at nine in the morning isn’t the same as a lobby at eleven at night. An alert that fires constantly stops being read within a week, so the aim isn’t to alert a lot — it’s to alert when someone has been there longer than the unit would consider normal. That threshold is tuned with the team and reviewed against what actually happens on shift.
Simulation · how IRIS works
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 rule gets built
- It goes to every camera
- Published, it watches alone
- And then it fires
Next step
When does a bad review get decided?
15 cases: 11 raise an alert when something happens and 4 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
Who is watching a whole quay at three in the morning?
14 cases: 13 raise an alert when something happens and one only measures. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
And the best part
Adding a camera costs what it costs;adding someone to watch it costs every single month.
Past a certain number, almost nobody’s watching anything. IRIS watches them all at once and only calls you when something you said mattered happens in one of them.
Tell us your problem and we’ll say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
A person answers, the same working day.