St. James Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, which has more than 1,000 beds, is a teaching hospital that specializes in not only treatment but health promotion and preventative services at its central location. Its current facility incorporates the clinical departments of the Trinity College medical school, the unit for dietetics and nutrition, the nursing school, the postgraduate center, and the library of the Faculty of Health Sciences. It is also a central location for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.
The Brief:
Tasked with keeping patients and staff safe from the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic, St. James Hospital needed a way to add additional screening capabilities to its facility alongside its existing access control terminals. The technology needed to bring a multi-layered approach to screening individuals entering the hospital facility who could potentially introduce a significant amount of risk to those within the facility. While access to patient floors was restricted in line with mandates set forth by the government, it was critical for St. James to have an added screening measure for incoming staff at the facility.
Solutions Provided:
- St. James Hospital chose the Vanderbilt ACTpro Access Control Solution integrated with the ZKTeco Proface-X-TD Facial Recognition Terminal to address its challenges. The ACTpro solution specifically used the ACT1500 Single Door IP Controller and ACT1030 MiFare Card Reader alongside the ZKTeco system.
- The Proface-X-TD solution uses intelligent engineering facial recognition algorithms and the latest computer vision technology. It supports both facial and palm verification for a fully touchless experience.
- Coupled with the Proface-X-TD solution, ACTpro can not only grant and restrict access based on biometric functionality, but can detect mask-wearing and high temperatures as a means to grant or restrict access to the facility. As a result, better hygiene is achieved with touchless biometric authentication, skin temperature detection, and masked individual identification.
- If a member of the staff presents to the door with high skin temperature, that individual is routed to another location, and the door will not open to identify potential infection.
- The Proface-X-TD solution is also equipped with an anti-spoofing algorithm for facial recognition against almost all types of fake photos and videos.
Installation Details:
- The ZKTeco Proface-X-TD terminals have a straightforward, intuitive interface to set temperature thresholds and collaborate with the environment around them. Protocols can be set to prevent access if a mask isn’t being worn, or if the temperature of the visitor is above the threshold.
- The solution is ideally suited to hospitals like St. James because of their ability to be layered as part of a comprehensive approach to screening individuals considered at-risk for infection as a means to protect patients and other staff members.
- The solution was selected because of its ability to accommodate a maximum of 30,000 facial templates and up to 5,000 palm templates, as well as its speed of recognition of less than 0.3 seconds per face. When implemented in a healthcare setting, these factors are crucial to successful implementation.
- The touchless nature of the terminals brings safety and hygiene issues to the forefront, cutting down on possible exposure to infectious disease. The device detects people with elevated temperatures who can then be further scrutinized to add extra screening processes and identify potential disease exposure.
- This ability, along with the visitor check-in and tracking processes integrated with the ACTpro access control system, is a critical component in today’s modern healthcare facilities to provide real-time data for security officials.
Key Takeaway:
“Using the ZKTeco terminal with the power of access control from Vanderbilt, St. James Hospital is better able to add additional screening procedures to protect patients and other staff members from potential infection exposure. This is crucial in a healthcare environment, where we’re already dealing with a vulnerable population, and protecting them is of the utmost importance — especially during the current pandemic and the added stress this brings to our staff and our patient’s families.”
Alan Buckley, Operations Manager - Facilities Management, St James’ Hospital.
About ZKTeco:
ZKTeco is a 20-year old, globally renowned provider of biometric verification algorithm techniques, sensors, and software platforms. ZKTeco owns several dozen patents related to numerous biometric modalities, including fingerprint, face, palm, and finger-vein pattern recognition. Other patents are related to identifying x-ray scanned objects and computer vision learning & video analytic techniques for recognizing and distinguishing human faces and physical behavior. ZKTeco also uniquely combines and incorporates numerous different biometric modalities into a single standalone device. As such, ZKTeco has been a leading pioneer in the field of hybrid biometric technology, which ensures any user can be biometrically authenticated by a ZKTeco device. This capability appeals to all vertical industries and their respective suppliers and system integrators.
About the Installer:
Forward Vision Security is a Dublin-based professional CCTV, alarm, and access installation company.