Historically, healthcare institutions have invested large amounts of money in video surveillance solutions to ensure the safety of their patients, staff, and visitors, at levels that are often regulated by strict legislation. 

In addition to facilitating surveillance tasks, video analytics allows us to go further, by exploiting the data collected in order to achieve as smart patient monitoring goals. For example, a video analytics solution could detect when a patient has not been checked for medication or routine checks according to their needs and alert the staff. Analysis of patient and visitor traffic can be extremely valuable in determining ways to shorten wait times, while ensuring clear access to the emergency area.

Care home monitoring of older adults or people with health issues is another example of an application that provides great value. For instance, falls are a major cause of injury and death in older persons. Although personal medical devices can detect falls, they must be worn and are frequently disregarded by the consumer. Checking if the person has moved in their room and returned back to bed and not fallen etc., A video analytics solution can process the signals of care home cameras to detect in real time if a person has fallen. With proper setup, such a system could also determine if a person took a given medication when they were supposed to, for instance.

Mental healthcare is another area in which video analytics can make significant contributions. Systems that analyse facial expressions, body posture, and gaze can be developed to assist clinicians in the evaluation of patients. Such a system is able to detect emotions from body language and micro-expressions, offering clinicians objective information that can confirm their hypotheses or give them new clues.

One of the great advantages of these approaches: video analytics can be trained to detect specific events, sometimes with a high degree of sophistication