59 Dutch care locations solve care staff shortages with Artificial Intelligence

But why are these locations not more evenly distributed? Why do they clutter? I can think of four causes:

1. There is little care staff shortage in the cities

The plot shows that most care locations using our software are in rural areas. Rural populations age faster. That is because younger people move to the cities where the work is. They do not become caregivers, and if they do, they do so in cities. That means more work pressure on the caregivers left behind in rural areas. This, in turn, means more caregivers in rural areas resign from care jobs because they are stressed out. Which leads to a domino effect. As our software helps care organizations deal with care staff shortages, our technology gets adapted in these rural areas first. That is what this plot shows.

2. The word-of-mouth effect

Our software is always sold through partners, that is, through system integrators. Most of them have a ten or twenty-year relationship with their customers, the care facilities. In the north of North Holland, we saw one of these partners, let me call her system integrator #1, sign up care home #1. Then we saw integrator #2 sign up the care home’s neighbor. And then we saw integrator #3 sign up its other neighbor. Did we just get lucky? Or was word-of-mouth at work, because the caregivers of these neighboring care facilities talked to each other? I am at the risk of stating this wishful effect as a drunkard uses a lamppost – not for illumination but for support 🙂

3. Adoption of our technology is slow because hardware takes a long time to be replaced

This plot should have shown a hundred times more care locations, which would have eliminated the clutter.
The famous MIT Professor of Robotics, Rodney Brooks, states that software adoption is a trillion times faster than hardware. ChatGPT reached a hundred million users in two months. It will take another 30 years before all cars are electric, while the US Air Force still flies 60-year-old B52s. Our artificial intelligence software, called the Kepler Night Nurse, runs on smart sensors. The software recognizes falls, with an unheard of reliability. Our software will also help prevent falls. This way, Kepler Night Nurse helps overcome staff shortages, as the artificial intelligence now looks after the elderly as well. But the smart sensors running our software require physical cabling and assembly. The plot shows it takes time for care homes to replace their old and outdated hardware. As a side note on outdated hardware, our software handles video from arbitrary cameras. In that case, the system integrator installs on-premise servers. Our software also runs embedded on state-of-the-art cameras with an AI chip on board. More on that later. Although I hope that within a few years 100% of our software runs embedded, it may well be that our on-premise solution runs for another 30 years.

4. Care locations of the same care home are geographically close

How to plot the use of our software? Very often, a single care home uses our software at multiple locations. Do you take the postal code of the headquarters of the care home, or do you take the postal codes of the individual locations? We took the latter approach, which added to the cluttered impression.
These are the reasons that explain why the adaptation of our software in the Netherlands is not more uniform in a geographical sense. Did the plot raise your interest in our software? You can try it out for one month for free, running embedded on the Mobotix C71 camera. Did your system integrator not yet decide on this type of technology? Does she recommend you use an alternative instead? Ask her to test us out and compare us to the others. We can supply her with testing scripts that go beyond testing just the easy cases.