As it works to develop what it's calling a "Self Aware Room" for hospitals, artificial intelligence company care.ai is collaborating with Google, using its Coral Edge tensor processing unit to drive faster edge-deployed neural networks for autonomous patient monitoring.

WHY IT MATTERS
The technology, says care.ai, will be able to more effectively and efficiently keep tabs on hospital patients' conditions, sending tailored notifications to staff to keep them apprised of what's happening in a room at any given time.

This could help with the management of preventable falls, pressure ulcers, infectious disease, and other patient safety issues, the company said, replacing reactive responses with more forward looking AI-powered predictive monitoring.

The deep learning platform, deployed at the edge of the network, will be more agile and quick, thanks to the Google's Coral TPU accelerator, according to care.ai. Its neural network, able to continuously learn from new data they crunch, represents a first-of-its-kind approach to staff monitoring algorithms, the company said.

THE LARGER TREND
Edge computing continues to gain traction across healthcare, with more and more health systems realizing its potential. The technology offerings are evolving too, pointing to big transformations ahead for the configuration of hospital rooms.

But as hospitals increasingly embrace neural networks, it's important that they maintain tight and rigorous oversight over the algorithms that power them. Research has shown that deep learning data can be inconsistent, potentially impacting diagnosis, treatment or patient safety.

ON THE RECORD
"We believe we are on the cusp of an amazing revolution for AI in healthcare and are proud to partner with care.ai to witness it becoming a reality," said Billy Rutledge, director of Coral at Google. "By combining care.ai’s AI-powered autonomous monitoring platform with our edge computing framework, we can address some of the most demanding challenges in healthcare."

"Imagine if we brought the power of AI with autonomous monitoring to healthcare environments – we could prevent injuries, diseases, protocol breaches, and ultimately fatalities; while improving staff efficiency," said Chakri Toleti, founder and CEO of care.ai. "By utilizing Google’s Edge TPU, care.ai has done just that – we have built an AI sensor to monitor, predict, and infer behaviors using billions of data points in real-time."