Nursing homes that feel

I recently heard a lecture by Juan Pablo Correa, a senior care technology specialist, in which he said something that caught my attention: in the near future, residences will be “buildings that feel”. My first thought made me believe that he was talking about "buildings with feelings" which I found poetic, although incredible. Very soon I understood that he was talking about buildings with senses! That will be somewhat more prosaic, but vastly more interesting.

We know that in order to offer care to people who live in nursing homes, the most important thing is staff and professional team. People who make their knowledge, senses and physical strength available to the elderly, coordinating to do so through the use of protocols, registers and programs. Today we already have cranes and other utensils that allow us not to depend solely on muscular strength; there are also management software and other technological aids. What will happen when existing technology joins artificial intelligence and computer self-learning (machine learning)?

Today, some homes for the elderly offer residents the possibility of wearing wristbands that allow a network of antennae connected to a computer to know where everyone is at all times. Yoy can add the system a "logical layer" that would send notifications to a care assistants when, for example, someone is in the bathroom for a long time or does not move. You can also add accelerometers to the bracelet so that it warns when a fall occurs. The system, which Ibernex offers in Spain, requires that each person carry the locator.

In a while that will no longer be necessary. MIT is studying a combination of cameras with image interpretation software and a radio frequency system so that the computer can "interpret" what is happening without any human intervention. The system could even measure the vital signs of whoever is in a room without having contact. The system also “learns as it works” so that, after a while, it can interpret that a risky situation is taking place, such as a fall or someone in particular leaving the room.

For those who may consider filling the residence with cameras too intrusive, the Vayyar company has found a solution that will soon be available for our nursing homes that allows us to install sensors that do not have a camera, but, by means of a kind of radars can "feel" the presence of people in a room and know if they are standing, sitting, lying down or even if they have fallen. People don't have to wear anything.

The key in the systems that I have explained is not so much the technology to "feel" if there is someone in a place and what they do, but the computing capacity to interpret and make sense of that information. A nursing home can have a thousand cameras, but if there is no one looking at the relevant screen all the time, the information they provide may be useless or even counterproductive (“How come no one attended to my mother immediately if the fall was recorded by the camera in the hall! ”). The point is that there is someone (though not human) always "watching."

Could the residences also "hear", "touch" and "smell" and do so in a way that respects privacy, allowing better service? If we go around the internet we will find examples that allow us to understand that in a short time they will be able to do so.

Before Christmas, we learned that an artificial intelligence algorithm, fed by thousands of cough recordings of volunteers who had undergone a PCR test and later shared their data, allowed the detection of covid-19 in more than 9 out of 10 people by the way of coughing. Does that mean that if there were microphones analyzing the sounds that are produced in the residence, we could perhaps detect a disease or complication even before it became evident? It is more than likely.

What bed and sheets that are in contact with the resident can do, "touching" him is also surprising. An article published in a medical technology magazine in 2018 dealt with the existence of beds that can know the vital signs of who is in them without the need for devices that have contact. Temperature, humidity, heart rate, breathing patterns…. And that was three years ago, so surely there are already systems that, by processing this data, can offer alerts or direct responses.

On how residences could use their smell, I have seen an article from the year 2000 on how to create an “artificial nose” that detects incontinence in residences, also another from 2015 and 2019 that analyzes how some diseases can be “smelt” in people.

How can we make buildings taste the residents?. That is harder for me to imagine.

Las Marismas Nursing home, 2031. While we talk with the manager about how things have changed, the system subtly warns a care giver that something is possibly going to happen in the bathroom of Mrs. Luisa Ramírez's room. The assistant arrives just in time to avoid something that she does not know what could become. She finds Luisa somewhat disoriented and offers her help. She talks to her for a moment and leaves.

A virtual server that is not even in the nursing home, or in the same continent, has been receiving data from the sensors, acoustic, olfactory, visual and tactile of the Las Marismas and many other nursing homes for years; saving them, treating them, analyzing them, and cross-referencing them with many other data sources such as the medication residents take, diaper changes, and more. Creating patterns and offering advice.

Those will be the “nursing homes they feel”. We may not see their ears, eyes or hands, but they will be there "feeling", and doing something like “thinking”.

Scary? Disturbing at the perverse use that someone can make of so much data? Surely yes, but no less likely.

Let us accept that technology goes in this direction and let us try to create the foundations for it to develop in the right direction. Let's see if we still have the time to do it.