I’m thinking: Have a camera pointed on the subject plugged in to a computer. And whenever the camera sees the subject do off things like stand up on his bed, or pull out a shoelace or anything strappy, the software would then sound an alarm alerting the guards…
Something like that would be relatively easy to develop wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t telemetry be even easier? Heart rate goes wonky, run to the cell.
Actually, I think it would be very difficult to develop. How, for example, is the computer going to recognize the person touching his shoe, let alone his shoelace?
It’s very hard to monitor inmates. Especially the savvy ones who know where the cam is. We’ve had inmates on suicide watch who managed to kill themselves despite constant monitoring, and in reviewing the tapes, nothing was really notable until suddenly they were dead. Some of these folk are CLEVER about that; I’ve been amazed at how they manage to kill themselves with minimal equipment and special cells.
And keeping a heart monitor on an inmate who doesn’t want one would be difficult.
It’s not easy to monitor someone 24/7.
There is software that already does this. Sort of. It is used to monitor patients that are at risk for falling in hospitals.
My experience with this consists of watching it used for about 5 minutes so I’m not familiar with any details.
A sort of virtual box is drawn around the edges of the patients bed. When any part of the patients body goes outside of the box an alarm alerts the operator, who has multiple screens showing these at risk patients. IIRC, if it looks like the patient is actually trying to get out of bed, the operator says something through an intercom along the lines of “Mrs. Smith please lay back down”. If the patient looks like they are still trying to get up, the operator alerts the nurses at the nearest nursing station.
These are patients that are at high risk for falling and hurting themselves while in the hospital, an all too common experience.
Sounds like you would get a ton of false positives. The difference between harmlessly tying one’s shoelaces and pulling out a shoelace for suicide would be almost impossibly difficult to write into software programming.
I’d be interested in hearing (though not seeing) more about these clever ways they do it.
I wouldn’t call it clever but I’ve had to deal with inmates who were so determined to kill themselves that they smashed their head into a wall or bit open their wrists. The only way you can stop somebody who is like that is to tie them to a mattress on the floor. And obviously that’s not a long term solution. (And drugging them into near-unconsciousness is illegal.)
As for a monitoring system like the OP describes, we go with a simpler option. We have an officer sit in a chair outside the cell and watch the inmate.