Safe Shower
Monitoring system for the prevention of suicide in medical settings
Inpatient suicide accounts for a proportionately small but clinically significant fraction of all suicides.
The most frequent method of suicide in psychiatric hospitals is hanging, and 75% of inpatient suicides occur in the patient’s bathroom, bedroom, or closet.
Half of these cases happen in the shower as the patient’s bathroom is the one area where a patient can have some privacy for a certain amount of time.
Over recent decades intense efforts have been taken to address suicides in psychiatric admitted people from changing procedures to designing the facilities to be ligature-free or ligature-resistant in order to impede tying anything to it.
However,the current solutions are not optimal and there is a need for a solution that will alert on suicide attempt while maintaining patients’ privacy in the shower.
Inventors
Prof. Gil Zalsman, Geha Mental Health Cente
Contact info
Avital Pritz, Director of Medical Devices and Digital Health
For further information please contact:
avital@mor-research.comA non-wearable device that is installed in the shower and recognizes alerting situations such as patient being on the ground, patient's feet not touching the ground or patient trying to install something overhead height.
Using a number of low cost ultrasonic waterproof sensors and an AI algorithm the device creates a grid of distance measurements and outputs movement patterns and alerts. The system does not reconstruct the image of the person nor does it use a camera, this allows to maintain patients' privacy while keeping them safe.
Psychiatric inpatient facilities present a unique set of challenges as any ligature opportunity can be abused for the purpose of suicide by hanging, especially in showers where patients have privacy.
Inpatient suicide accounts for a proportionately small but clinically significant fraction of all suicides. Of the 35,000 or more suicides per year in the United States, about 1800 (6%) are inpatient suicides.
Our solution could also address patients with suicidal risk at home care facilities, retirement homes, prisons etc.
A prototype device was developed and successfully installed at Geha Mental Health Center.
The patent is in PCT status