Google announced recently that it’s partnering with hospitals to make Nest camera products available during the coronavirus pandemic. Ultimately, Google is hoping to donate 10,000 such cameras to hospitals around the country.

In a Google guest blog post Monday morning, a registered nurse named Robbie Freeman, at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, wrote about how that institution is working with Nest cameras. The hospital is the first to roll out what is planned as a nationwide program.

This week, Mount Sinai has begun placing two Nest cameras in more than 100 rooms in which the hospital is treating coronavirus patients. The video will be live-streamed to a console located near the hospitals’ nurse stations.

“We needed to find a way to give caregivers the ability to check on and communicate with patients that could supplement in-person checks, also helping reduce the use of PPE,” Freeman wrote in the blog post. “Together with Google, we explored how to build a Nest Camera experience that would help health care workers more efficiently care for patients and preserve PPE.”

Freeman added that the hospital and Google worked together to make sure the provided solution works with “regulatory guidelines, HIPAA and other legal and regulatory requirements.”

The collaboration is available to hospitals provided they have a Wi-Fi network with WPA2 encryption, with a 5GHz Wi-Fi network capability recommended. Also required is a G Suite account, and “powerful monitoring stations for accommodating multiple camera feeds with live video,” such as relatively new tablets and computers, including with 10M download/5M upload consistent bandwidth. See the full requirements here.

Nest was originally founded as Nest Labs, by former Apple engineers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, in 2010; Fadell is known for his work on the original iPod. Its first major product with the Nest Thermostat.

Google acquired Nest, for $3.2 billion, in 2014, and after Nest bought Dropcam in 2014, it debuted the first Nest Camera. When Google restructured as part of Alphabet, Nest was a standalone division for three years, before it was merged back into Google in 2019. “The Nest ecosystem is dead,” Ars Technica wrote at the time. “Nest accounts are dead. Nest’s privacy firewall is dead.”

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons.

Image: Reuters