Healthcare delivery is becoming increasingly challenging with having to do more with fewer resources.
Smart sensors such as AI-enabled cameras and microphones can act as eyes and ears to ensure public safety, improve patient care, and enhance operational efficiency at healthcare facilities.
It’s now possible with smart sensors to measure the hygiene state of patient rooms and ICUs, prevent patient safety risks such as falls, and speed up bed turnover step-by-step using custom machine learning models.
Ouva and NVIDIA Clara Guardian
To increase the adoption of such technologies, solutions need to be designed in an ethical and privacy-respecting way. Delivering AI at the edge, on devices inside patient rooms, minimizes data privacy concerns both by ensuring such devices cannot be used for unwanted tracking and by giving patients full control. Once patients and staff are on board, real-time AI can help hospitals provide quality, efficient patient care and reduce the workload of front-line healthcare workers while increasing capacity in facilities.
Ouva and NVIDIA are bringing AI to the edge of healthcare with NVIDIA Clara Guardian, an application framework that simplifies the development and deployment of smart sensors with multi-modal AI anywhere in a hospital.
NVIDIA Clara is a healthcare-specific set of SDKs and application frameworks that run on the NVIDIA EGX platform for AI computing on edge servers and embedded devices.
Ouva first installed sensors backed by NVIDIA Clara Guardian at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands and plans to cover hundreds of beds in the next year in neurology wards, infection units and beyond.
"We have selected Ouva because of the promise it holds for sensing patient caregiver interactions in facilities, and improving care quality - all areas due for transformation. The ease in integrating their solution with others in the hospital provides endless possibilities in increasing safety of patient care, healthcare worker satisfaction, and transforming our operation. As every hospital integration requires a level of customization, the team's ability to quickly, and enthusiastically respond to our ideas and proposals underscored the flexibility of Ouva platform. We are looking forward to expanding the footprint of Ouva at Radboud UMC and being champions in helping spread the benefits of contact-free, remote monitoring," said Prof. Dr. Harry van Goor of Radboudumc.
Ouva’s current solution is versatile with capabilities that directly tackle difficult challenges in the hospitals such as:
- Reducing infection risks by monitoring contact between people and surfaces
- Improving patient recovery by tracking mobility of at-risk patients
- Analyzing patient discharge steps to reduce bed turnover delays
"Ouva’s intelligent video analytics solution, powered by NVIDIA Clara Guardian, is making a real difference in patient care at this difficult time," said Raghav Mani, Product Manager for Healthcare at NVIDIA. "Using sensors and AI to monitor hygiene will play an important role in managing infectious diseases in hospital environments."
"We have been using NVIDIA GPUs in Ouva solutions from day one. With our new solution, we are aiming to allow nurses to monitor hundreds of patients, in realtime," said Dogan Demir, CEO of Ouva. "Clara Guardian framework allows us to build a scalable and efficient solution in no time, allowing our team to focus on our core competency - developing algorithms that unlock the potential of remote care."
By delivering contact-free, real-time infection control, patient mobility monitoring, room assignment, and many other benefits that enhance safety, well being and operational efficiency in hospitals, Ouva and NVIDIA Clara Guardian are ushering in a new generation of smart hospitals.
