Mount Sinai deploys Google Nest cameras for patient monitoring and COVID-19 communication – TechCrunch

The current global COVID-19 pandemic has generated a lot of activities around distance care, but a new project from Mount Sinai Hospital, in collaboration with Google Nest shows how even on-site care can be safer using remote technologies. Clinicians at Mount Sinai have started using Google Nest cameras in patient rooms, to provide patient video symptoms and vital signs monitoring, as well as two-way communication.

Using Nest Cameras for this help healthcare professionals, including nurses and doctors, to limit their potential exposure to COVID-19, allowing them to centrally monitor and deliver care, while limiting interaction from person to person. person only contact extremely necessary. This reduces exposure, which is crucial since frontline healthcare workers are particularly exposed to a large viral load, which basically means that the more you are in contact with people infected with COVID-19, the more you are likely your immune system is unable to keep up and you will become infected.

It also helps the hospital in another key way: the preservation of personal protective equipment (PPE). Remote monitoring means staff will be able to wear far fewer masks and gloves, ensuring that stock levels don't run out as quickly as they would have been otherwise.

Google is installing Nest cameras in more than 100 rooms on Mount Sinai in New York and plans to provide up to 10,000 devices and custom monitoring consoles for hospitals in the United States. The system is also designed so that Google does not store any collected footage and does not even have access to it to preserve patient confidentiality.

Even with the direct care needed to help protect lives, remote health technology clearly has a role to play in mitigating the worst potential impacts of the pandemic. This is probably just the beginning of the way we see how this type of technology is implemented to try to strengthen the health infrastructure under pressure as the crisis continues.