Fall and presence detection without a camera in the room

The dignity problem

Everyone agrees that a resident who falls at 2am should be found in minutes rather than at the morning round. Almost nobody agrees to a camera in a bedroom or a bathroom to achieve it — and rightly so. The usual compromises are worse: a pull cord the resident cannot reach after a fall, a pendant they took off to sleep, or hourly checks that wake people who were sleeping fine.

Radar sensing removes the trade-off. The sensor measures movement, position and posture in the room without ever forming an image. It can tell that someone has fallen, that they have not moved in an unusual length of time, or that a bed has been left and not returned to — and it cannot tell you what they look like, because that information never exists.

What it detects

• Falls — a fall event raised in real time, day or night, whether or not the resident can call for help.
• Presence and absence — whether a room or a bed is occupied, without a wearable and without anyone opening a door to check.
• Bed exit and prolonged absence — a resident who has left the bed and not returned within an expected window, which is often the earliest signal that something is wrong.
• Inactivity — an unusual lack of movement over time, surfaced as a check-on-them prompt rather than an alarm.

Why radar rather than a camera or a wearable

A camera creates a recording that has to be stored, secured, retained and eventually justified to a family or a regulator. A wearable only works while it is worn and charged, which for the residents most at risk is the exact failure mode. Radar works through the ordinary conditions that defeat both: complete darkness, steam in a bathroom, a resident under a blanket, someone who has removed everything they were asked to wear.

Because there is no footage, there is no footage to leak. That is a materially easier conversation with families, with staff who do not want to be filmed either, and with anyone assessing the facility.

How it is deployed

Sensors are fitted per room and report to a server on the facility's own network — the same on-premise principle behind everything we build. Staff see room status and receive alerts where they already look, and events can be routed to a nurse-call system or announced through an IP paging and intercom system so the right person hears it in the right place.

For the common areas of a facility, where imaging is acceptable and useful, this pairs naturally with on-premise video analytics for occupancy and safety monitoring. Cameras stay in the corridors and day rooms; the private rooms get radar. Both keep their data on site.

Sensing

Radar — no camera, no microphone, no image

Wearable required

None

Works in

Darkness, steam, under bedding

Data

Events only, held on the facility's own server