Events, not recordings.
Companion has a camera and a microphone. By design, it keeps structured observations — not a feed. Here is the technical line and why we drew it.
A bedside device with a camera and a microphone could be a surveillance product. We chose the opposite shape. Companion's job is to notice care events and write them down in a form a nurse can act on — not to assemble a continuous record of a resident's room.
What actually gets kept
Vision is ambient. Frames are processed on-device for context — is someone in the bed, is the resident upright, is a caregiver present — and discarded within a short rolling window. No video is written to long-term storage. Microphones behave the same way at the audio layer: raw audio is held only long enough to extract a transcript and then dropped.
Conversations produce structured events, not transcripts-in-perpetuity. Resident declined hydration prompt at 14:02. Two-person assist completed at 09:18. The transcript itself is retained briefly so a nurse can verify the event against the source, then pruned per the facility's retention policy. The event — small, structured, auditable — is what lives in the chart.
Why privacy-by-design, not compliance
We could meet a compliance bar with encryption, access logs, and a long retention window. That is the easy shape and the wrong one. Event extraction at ingest means the sensitive raw data exists for seconds, not months, and most of it never crosses the device boundary. A breach of our backend cannot leak a feed that was never stored.
The product impact is the part that matters. A resident's room stays a resident's room. Families do not have to ask what is being kept, because the answer is short and the same every time. And the surface area of any incident — ours, a partner's, a stolen laptop — is dramatically smaller. The next thing we are shipping is a per-resident event log a family can read, in plain language, alongside the care plan.