A privacy-aware fall detection system for hospitals and nursing facilities

Hospitals and nursing facilities are confronted with a critical shortage of qualified nursing staff. At the same time, patient safety must not fall by the wayside. Therefore we are facing a growing demand for assistance technologies that free up time for medical responsibilities. We introduce a fall detection system based on cameras and computer vision algorithms, which satisfies the high privacy demands of hospitals and nursing facilities. Our system explains its operations to patients and staff in order to establish transparency. Whenever we show video data to a nurse, it is either anonymized using image processing techniques or protected against misuse through usage control enforcement. We thus provide a system with a high level of functionality without sacrifying privacy.