Australian-first aged care CCTV trial saw ‘thousands’ of false alerts

A year-long government trial of closed-circuit television (CCTV) monitoring in aged care has been scrapped after it generated more than 12,000 false reports, according to an independent review.

Artificial intelligence technology, cameras and sound devices were installed in residents' rooms and common areas inside Mount Pleasant District Hospital and Northgate House between 2021-22.

The $750,000 pilot, led by the South Australian government, came after the royal commission identified numerous cases of elder abuse and neglect in residential care homes.

The technology used in the trial was designed to detect excessive noise and movement, such as falls or calls for help, triggering an alert to a staff member to review the footage.

After the pilot wrapped up in March, a review of the findings highlighted a number of issues around accuracy, privacy and workloads.

It found the CCTV system was unable to distinguish between potential incidents and typical movements or sounds, leaving staff overburdened with fake alerts.

"The system generated over 12,000 alerts across the two sites that were not verified as ‘true events’,” the report said.

“The number of false alerts in the first few months of the pilot meant that the staff at both sites were overwhelmed by the workload associated with responding to alerts.”

Speaking of the findings, SA health minister Chris Picton slammed the former government's "botched" program.

“Clearly the system didn’t work properly, clearly it is not an acceptable level of false alerts to be making, and clearly the staff therefore had to take action in terms of not being able to respond to all of these false alerts," he told reporters.

“To get to the point where the report notes that where there was some cases of actual true reports, it meant that staff weren’t responding to them because it became the case of the ‘boy who cried wolf’ to this system.”

The minister said he would be consulting aged care stakeholders on how CCTV and other surveillance and monitoring could be better used in aged care settings.

"We can’t have a situation where we’re actually making staff’s job harder by using technology,” he said.

“It’s got to be about making staffs jobs easier and making residents lives better."

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