England’s ambulance trusts are expected to be given body cameras by the end of the month as assaults on ambulance workers rise by almost a third in five years.

AmbulanceThe NHS is expecting to make body-worn camera equipment available to all 10 of England’s ambulance trusts by the end of the month, following an increase in attacks on ambulance workers.

BBC News reported that more than 3,500 attacks on emergency care staff were recorded last year. In 2018, SHP reported that 465 ambulances and their paramedics were to be issued with body cameras as part of an initial pilot.

Police officers in Humber, parking wardens in Yorkshire and recycling workers in Oxfordshire have all been issued with body cameras in recent years to help ensure their safety. In addition, there is a rising demand for body-cams for retail workers, particularly after an increase in verbal and physical assaults during the coronavirus pandemic.

This latest move has been welcomed by staff trialling the cameras, some of whom had experienced violence on the job.

Chief People Officer for NHS England Prerana Isaar told the BBC: “Every member of our dedicated and hardworking NHS staff has the fundamental right to be safe at work and it is our priority to eliminate violence and abuse, which we will not tolerate.”

Hikvision is helping to make the transition back to in-person learning easier for teachers, students and administrators with advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology built into their Deepinview IDS 7 Series cameras. Designed with a host of intelligent features, Hikvision Deepinview Cameras provide a cost-effective solution for a myriad range of security and health safety applications including elevated temperature screening, social distancing and mask detection, active shooter detection, visitor management, and more.
“Our second generation Deepinview cameras with AI-driven intelligence Artificial Intelligence can help school districts get back into classrooms with advanced proactive health, safety and security capabilities,” said John Xiao, VP of Marketing, Hikvision. “Hikvision continues to make a significant investment in AI technology, moving which will continue to move physical security system solutions from passive to more proactive solutions across all vertical markets and applications.”

Hikvision Deepinview cameras provide a range of benefits made possible by AI to improve security in school offices, common areas and classrooms. With the ability to classify target objects, With multi-target and multi-type detection, the cameras can simultaneously recognise multiple attributes such as clothing colour, age, and identify if a person is wearing a backpack, hat, or glasses – even in a crowded school hallway.

Specific areas of the facility or premises can be monitored with alarms set to trigger for human only, vehicle only, or human and vehicle, providing proactive security while also helping to reduce false alarm notifications, improve video verification, and enhance alarm response efficiency. Improved Deepinview AI algorithms reduce false alarms by more than 95 percent. The cameras can detect human and vehicle overlapping and multiple targets overlapping. It also precisely detects a human with the detection bonding box, excluding the broader range of a human shadow, for enhanced monitoring and accuracy. It is even possible to automatically track specific individuals across a campus or school grounds using e-PTZ auto tracking, while conserving bandwidth and storage space by only storing video clips of objects flagged as important.

To help boost health initiatives in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Hikvision Deepinview cameras offer attribute-based people counting. This feature enables people counting for individuals entering or exiting a specified area within a certain timeframe. The camera sends a threshold alarm if people density becomes too high, alerting school staff to reduce occupancy to comply with social distancing and other safety requirements.

Every Hikvision Deepinview camera contains an AI chipset that supports six different deep learning algorithms. Any algorithm can be enabled manually for dedicated use and changed to another one as needed for greater flexibility in any situation. Each camera is equipped with Hikvision’s Darkfighter technology for clear images in low lighting or changing lighting conditions. Hikvision Deepinview cameras also feature EXIR 2.0, H265+ video compression technology, support for metadata, five video streams, and up to five custom streams for easy third-party integration. Seamless streaming improves video quality across varying network conditions. IPCs can also smooth and complete videos through smooth streaming technology when the network bandwidth is insufficient, or when the network environment is not stable.

Worldwide spending on information security and risk management technology and services is forecast to grow 12.4% to reach $150.4 billion in 2021, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. Security and risk management spending grew 6.4% in 2020.

Gartner analysts said the strong growth rate reflects continuing demand for remote worker technologies and cloud security.

“Organisations continue to grapple with the security and regulatory demands of public cloud and software as a service,” said Lawrence Pingree, managing research vice president at Gartner. “Looking ahead, we’re seeing early market signals of growing automation and further adoption of machine learning technologies in support of AI security. To combat attacks, organisations will extend and standardise threat detection and response activities.”

In the Gartner 2021 CIO Agenda Survey, cyber security was the top priority for new spending, with 61% of the more than 2,000 CIOs surveyed increasing investment in cyber/information security this year.

Security services including consulting, hardware support, implementation and outsourced services represent the largest category of spending in 2021, at almost $72.5 billion worldwide.

The smallest but fastest growing market segment is cloud security, particularly cloud access security brokers (CASB). “The pace of client inquiry indicates that CASB is a popular choice for cloud-using organisations,” said Mr. Pingree. “This is due to the growing popularity of using non-PC devices for interacting with core business processes, which creates security risks that can be mitigated effectively with a CASB. CASBs also enable safer interaction between SaaS applications and unmanaged devices.”

Integrated risk management (IRM) technology is also seeing robust double-digit growth resulting from risks highlighted during the global pandemic crisis.

“Areas of significant risk driving near-term demand include the advent of new digital products and services and the related health and safety uses, as well as third-party risks such as customer data breaches or supply chain attacks,” said John A. Wheeler, senior research director at Gartner.