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How long before anyone notices someone has gone down?

Twenty minutes on the floor

It’s 5:10 a.m. on the fourth floor. Someone gets up to go to the bathroom, feels dizzy on turning and falls beside their own door. No cry for help. The hallway is empty, the lights are down and the nurses’ station is a hundred feet and a corner away. The hallway camera has been recording it since the first second. The six o’clock round hasn’t started yet.

19 cameras across 10 sectors

This is how you ask for it

«Tell me as soon as someone is on the floor of a hallway and is still there, even at night with nobody passing.»

What you pay for isn’t the fall: it’s the time until somebody arrives. Forty minutes on the floor with a broken hip means a longer stay, a family asking questions and a report that has to be explained. In a care home it also means an inspection. And the most expensive part appears on no piece of paper: the next round is done in fear, and the night shift ends up asking for two people where one used to be enough.

You decide once

This is decided once and never has to be repeated. The organization says where: these hallways, these rooms, this lobby. It says how long: if someone has been lying still for more than thirty seconds. And it says what happens next: open an incident, alert the nurses’ station, keep the video from before the fall. From then on IRIS applies it every night, on every one of those cameras, without anyone having to remember.

A person on the ground is the same scene in places with nothing else in common. A hospital hallway at dawn. A prison landing mid-afternoon. The lobby of a bank branch. A process unit where nobody walks past for three hours. All of them have cameras, and almost all of them have two people watching forty screens at once. The fall is always recorded. It’s almost never seen.

The day it goes wrong, the video turns up afterward. You learn the exact time of the fall, and you also learn how long it took for someone to arrive: eighteen minutes, twenty-six, forty. That number is the one that ends up in the report, and it’s the one that stings, because with a hip fracture or a stroke it is the first minutes that change the outcome. Nobody did anything wrong. There was simply nobody watching that particular screen at that particular hour.

IRIS watches all of them at once. When it sees a body on the ground that doesn’t get up, it waits the seconds you set and then speaks: the camera, the exact spot, and video from before the fall. It does not know who that person is, and it does not need to. The recording explains what happened. The alert means there is less to explain.

What changes

Before, the fall was discovered on the round and the video was reviewed the next day to reconstruct the time. Now the person on duty gets the camera already open, with the exact minute and the spot in the hallway, while the patient is still on the floor. It doesn’t change the number of falls: that depends on flooring, footwear and medication. It changes how long someone takes to arrive, which is the only part a screen can improve.

Where we have seen it

  • Mid-morning in a high-street branch. A person is lying face down on the lobby floor, not moving; their glasses have fallen a hand’s width away. An employee has crouched down to help and two customers have turned round. At the other end of the room, propped beside the waiting-area sofa, there’s a briefcase nobody has been near for six minutes. IRIS sees both things at once: there’s someone on the floor who isn’t getting up, and there’s a bag on its own. It does not know who that person is or what has happened to them.

    CAM-519Someone on the floor and a briefcase nobody comes back for

    «Tell me if somebody has been lying still on the lobby floor for more than thirty seconds, and tell me too if a bag is left alone in the public area for more than five minutes.»

    See this camera →Banking

  • A person is on the floor, in the marble circle by the entrance. A staff member has crouched down beside them, an officer is supporting an arm and a third employee is logging what happened on a tablet. In the same frame, higher up, two people have an equipment cabinet open right under a camera dome. They’re two different events and neither waits for the other: IRIS sees both at once and raises them separately, each to the person it belongs to. One goes to the floor manager; the other, to the technical team.

    CAM-534Someone on the floor and, at the same time, an open equipment cabinet

    «Tell me if somebody falls or stays down on the floor, and tell me too if somebody opens an equipment cabinet or covers a camera.»

    See this camera →Casinos

  • Early afternoon in the yard by the auxiliary laboratory. A person is lying face up on the concrete, hard hat beside their head and arms out to the sides. They aren’t moving. A colleague walks toward them from the right; further back, a forklift and a third person. Behind, the acid tank and the solvent drums. IRIS doesn’t know what happened: it sees a person horizontal where a person should be upright, and it starts timing.

    CAM-316A person on the ground outside the laboratory

    «Alert me as soon as you see somebody lying on the yard floor and not getting up.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • At the end of the aisle there’s a person lying still on the floor. Between them and the rest of the hall a cart is standing across the way, leaving two and a half feet to get past, and halfway along a raised-floor tile is lifted with the opening exposed. At the other end, the containment door of the aisle is open and somebody is holding it while working. A second person is already heading for the far end. IRIS sees all four things at once and puts them in order: first, the person who isn’t moving.

    CAM-559Someone on the floor and an aisle you can’t get through

    «Tell me if somebody has been still on the floor of a hall for more than thirty seconds, and tell me whether the aisle to them is clear.»

    See this camera →Data centers

  • Refrigeration compressor room. The pipes on the rack are covered in frost and icicles, and out of one side comes a thick white cloud that already fills half the room. Beside the yellow floor line a worker is lying on his back, with pieces of ice fallen around him. Four others are getting out: one is already in the doorway at the back. IRIS sees the cloud, the frost, the person down and who has left. It doesn’t measure ammonia.

    CAM-219Cloud in the chiller plant room and a person on the floor

    «Tell me if a cloud comes out in the plant room, if somebody is on the floor, or if anybody is left inside during an evacuation.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • A unit hallway in the small hours. Someone is lying on the floor, on their side, one arm stretched out in front of them. A few feet away an empty wheelchair sits against the wall and, further on, a dressings cart stands unused. The room door is shut and nobody walks past. IRIS sees that there’s a person on the floor and how long they have been there; it doesn’t know who they’re or what happened.

    CAM-118Someone on the hallway floor

    «Tell me as soon as somebody is on the floor of a hallway and stays there, even at four in the morning when nobody walks past.»

    See this camera →The hospital

  • Mid-afternoon in the lobby. On the floor, between the sofas and the bar, someone is lying down and not getting up. Beside them a glass is overturned, the drink spilled and some broken pieces on the marble. A member of staff has kneeled down to help and another is on the phone two steps away. From the sofa, a guest watches. At the bar, the customers carry on and the barman keeps serving. IRIS does not know who that person is or what has happened to them: it sees a body on the floor that has not moved for almost a minute, and it raises the alert.

    CAM-507Someone on the lobby floor who isn’t getting up

    «Tell me when somebody has been on the floor for more than fifteen seconds in any public area.»

    See this camera →Hotels

  • A worker in blue coveralls and a safety vest, lying on the gravel between two transformers. He is alone: there’s nobody else on the site. He hasn’t moved for several minutes. IRIS doesn’t know what happened to him, and won’t say: it knows there’s a person on the ground who hasn’t moved for a while.

    CAM-164A worker on the ground, not moving

    «Tell me if somebody stays still on the ground for more than a few minutes, especially if they are alone on the site.»

    See this camera →Critical infrastructure

  • Upper floor, between the escalator and the panoramic elevator. There’s a person on the ground and two people crouched down helping. Around them a ring of fourteen has closed and cut off the way through, right where the escalator drops people off. And the escalator doesn’t stop: it keeps delivering fifty-two people a minute to a spot where nobody can move forward. Two and a half feet of clear width are left.

    CAM-543The escalator keeps feeding people into a blocked landing

    «Tell me if somebody has been on the ground for over thirty seconds, or if an escalator landing runs out of clear width.»

    See this camera →Malls

  • Early afternoon in a unit with no permanent staff. A worker in blue coveralls and a yellow hard hat is lying face up across the drainage channel, arms spread. He isn’t moving. There’s nobody around: the stairs are empty, the walkway is empty, the rest of the plant is empty. The camera doesn’t know what happened to him. It knows there’s a person on the ground, in a place where nobody lies down, and that he hasn’t moved for a while.

    CAM-332A person on the ground and an empty plant around them

    «Tell me if anyone stays motionless on the ground for more than a minute anywhere in the unit.»

    See this camera →Industry

What it doesn’t do

IRIS does not know whether that person is injured, asleep or simply sitting on the floor, and it makes no diagnosis. It sees a body that does not get up and speaks so that a human looks.

It does not identify anyone and it does not recognize faces. And if no camera covers that stretch of hallway, there is no alert there: what is not seen is not seen.

Questions

Can I decide how many seconds pass before it alerts?
Yes. You choose the delay, and it changes a great deal with the place. In a busy lobby, fifteen or thirty seconds is usually enough. In a hallway nobody walks through at night it can be shorter, because there’s nothing to confuse it with. That delay exists so that bending down to pick something up or sitting for a moment doesn’t trigger an alert. What raises the alarm isn’t going down to the floor: it’s staying there.
Can it tell a fall from someone sitting down on the floor?
Yes, and what separates them is time and posture. Someone sitting down moves, shifts position and gets up again. Someone who’s fallen stays flat and still. That’s why the alert doesn’t fire the instant a person goes down, but when that posture holds for longer than you set. In a hospital waiting room, that single distinction removes almost every alert you wouldn’t want.
Does it work at night, with the hallway lights down?
Yes, and that’s exactly when it’s used most. The hallways of a hospital or a care home run on minimal light with nobody in sight for hours, and an ordinary camera still sees enough to make out a person lying on the floor. Even so, before accepting the rule, look at that particular camera at that particular hour. It’s a five-minute check and it saves surprises.
Does IRIS know who the person who fell is?
No. IRIS does not recognize faces and identifies nobody: it sees a body on the ground that does not get up and reports which camera and which point of the hallway. Who that person is, is known by whoever arrives, because they know the unit. This rule needs nothing more, and asking for less personal data than necessary is also how a system survives over time.

See all the questions

A different case every time

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.

  1. You ask
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  3. It shows you
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And the best part

A recording gets watched when nothing can be done.An alert lands while there’s still time to act.

IRIS raises the alert while it’s happening and says where: the camera, the time and the images from that moment. With that, whoever is on duty is still in time to act.

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