Overview
Butlr Care is a privacy-first ambient monitoring solution for senior living and care communities. It helps care teams understand what is happening in a resident's space, and respond sooner, without cameras, wearables, or anything that captures a resident's identity.
Care runs on Butlr's anonymous thermal sensing. Ceiling-mounted Heatic™ sensors read body heat and movement, never images or video of people, so the system can recognize presence, posture, and activity while preserving resident privacy and dignity.
Butlr Care helps communities:
- See safety-relevant events as they happen, such as falls and bed or chair exits
- Understand activity and behavior patterns over time to support proactive care
- Reduce reliance on reactive tools like pull cords and pressure pads
- Give care teams useful signal without adding to their charting load
- Preserve resident privacy in the most sensitive spaces, including bathrooms
Butlr Care is a distinct solution from Butlr Workplace+, built on the same privacy-first sensing platform. This article covers the senior living and care use case.
Please note: Butlr Care is in active development and available through an early-access program. It runs on Butlr's Gen-3 hardware. The capabilities described in this article span what is available in current pilot deployments and what is in development. Feature availability, behavior, and timing vary by deployment and may change. Nothing here is a commitment to a specific feature or release date. Your Butlr contact will confirm what is available for your community.
Who Butlr Care Is For
Butlr Care is built for senior living and care operators and the teams who work on the floor.
- Operators and owners get a monitoring approach that supports resident safety and operational efficiency without the privacy and dignity problems that come with camera-based systems.
- Care teams get timely, relevant signal about the residents they look after, with fewer nuisance alerts than legacy sensors tend to generate.
- Residents and families get safety and peace of mind from a system that never watches or identifies anyone.
What Butlr Care Can Do
Butlr Care combines real-time awareness with proactive insight. The capabilities are grouped below by what they help your team do. Butlr Care is developing quickly, so exactly what is enabled for your community depends on your hardware configuration, setup, and stage of the program, and is confirmed with your Butlr contact.
Safety and real-time awareness
- Fall awareness, based on detecting a person lying down outside of a bed or couch beyond a set threshold
- Bed and couch exit and activity, including entry, exit, and time spent
- Out-of-bed, zone, and room entry and exit events, including workflows relevant to wandering in memory care
- A live activity view showing what is happening in a room as an abstracted, anonymized view (for example, where an event is happening and what type it is), not raw thermal footage of a resident
Insight and trends
- Occupancy: whether a room is occupied and for how long
- Companion time: how long two or more people were in a room together, for example a resident with a caregiver or visitor
- Historical views by room across recent days and weeks
- Activity and night-watch patterns intended as early signals worth a closer look
Workflow and integrations
- Event history your team can review, with the ability to confirm or dismiss events and add a note (for example, marking a caregiver-assisted movement as not a fall)
- A room overview to see monitored spaces at a glance
- Role-based access for administrators and care staff
- Integrations that let Care events flow into systems your team already uses, such as nurse-call and record-keeping tools
If a capability matters to your community, tell your Butlr contact. Pilot feedback directly shapes what gets built.
How Butlr Care Works
Every Butlr Care deployment uses three parts that work together.
- Heatic™ 3 sensors sense heat and movement in the room. They are camera-free and capture no images, video, audio, or personally identifiable information. Sensors have no internet connection of their own.
- The Hive gateway carries data from the sensors to the Butlr Cloud over Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or cellular, with automatic failover if a connection drops.
- The Butlr Cloud and the Care web app process the anonymous data and present it to your team, with API and webhook access for integrations.
Data is anonymous from the room to the cloud. Sensors read body heat, not identity, and privacy is enforced by the hardware itself.
The Care web app is available in a browser at care.butlr.io. Access is provisioned by Butlr for your community.
What You Need to Get Started
Butlr Care runs on Butlr's next-generation (Gen-3) hardware.
- Heatic™ 3 sensors (wired). Care uses the wired Heatic 3 configuration.
- At least one Hive gateway. Each sensor connects to a Hive, and larger deployments add more Hives. The number of sensors per Hive is sized for each deployment.
- Network connectivity at the site, through Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or cellular.
- Care web app access, provisioned by Butlr.
Sensors are ceiling mounted and are for indoor use. Optimal installation height is roughly 7 to 13 feet. Butlr works with each community on placement and coverage as part of onboarding.
If your community also needs Care events to reach a nurse-call system, an electronic record, or another platform, Butlr's API-first design supports integrations. Talk to your Butlr contact about what your community uses.
Availability
Butlr Care is available today through Butlr's early-access program to a limited number of pilot communities, and runs on Gen-3 hardware. If you are interested in Butlr Care for your community, contact the Butlr team to discuss fit, timing, and a pilot. Contact details are at the end of this article.
Privacy and Security
Privacy is the starting point for Butlr Care, not an add-on.
- Anonymous by design. Camera-free sensing with no images, video, or audio, and no personally identifiable information collected. The low-resolution thermal data cannot contain a recognizable image of a person.
- No wearables. Nothing for residents to wear, charge, or remember.
- Encrypted. Data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2) and at rest.
- Access controlled. OIDC authentication, with role-based access for administrators and care staff in the production platform.
- Independently assessed. SOC 2 Type II certified, tier-certified data centers, with annual internal audits and external penetration tests.
Hardware regulatory certifications for the Gen-3 platform are in progress.
Key Concepts to Understand
A few ideas make Butlr Care easier to work with.
Ambient monitoring
Care monitors a space continuously and passively, without anyone needing to wear a device or actively check in. The sensor sees the room, not the person's identity.
Real-time alerts
Alerts are generated from live sensor data so teams can respond in the moment. To avoid noise, events register only after a short period of sustained detection, and a quick step-out-and-return is treated as a single event rather than two.
No detection system is perfect. Butlr Care may not detect every event, and it can occasionally register an event when nothing significant happened (for example, a caregiver assisting a resident on the bed can look like a fall). That is why the app lets your team confirm or dismiss events, and why Care is meant to support your team's judgment, not replace it. See the note under "Is Butlr Care a medical device?" below.
Historical insight
Care keeps a record of events and activity over time, so teams can look at patterns across recent days and weeks rather than only reacting to single moments.
Zones
A room is divided into zones (for example, a bed zone or a bathroom zone) so events can be understood in context. If furniture is moved after setup, zones may need to be adjusted so activity keeps reading correctly.
Anonymous thermal
Care works from body heat, a low-resolution thermal signal. This is what lets the system understand posture and activity in private spaces while keeping residents anonymous.
What your team sees in the app is an abstracted, anonymized view of that activity, such as where an event happened and what type it was. The app does not show raw thermal footage or a thermal image of a resident, in either the live view or event history.
Getting Started Checklist (for pilot communities)
Use this when you begin a Butlr Care deployment.
1. Connect with the Butlr team
Butlr will help scope the deployment, confirm the spaces to monitor, and plan hardware and coverage for your community.
2. Confirm site readiness
Check that the spaces to be monitored have suitable mounting locations and network connectivity. Butlr will guide sensor placement and coverage.
3. Align on the events that matter
Decide with your care team which events and thresholds to start with, such as the nighttime out-of-bed window or the events you want reviewed first. These can be tuned as your team sees real activity in the app.
4. Set up access
Butlr provisions access to the Care web app for your team. Confirm who needs administrator access and who needs standard access.
5. Start with the live activity view and event history
Begin with the live activity view and the event history for the rooms in your deployment. Confirming and annotating events helps your team build a shared view and helps Butlr tune the system over time.
6. Move into insight and workflows
As data accumulates, use historical views and trends to support proactive care, and discuss any integrations your community needs with your Butlr contact.
Common Questions
Can Butlr Care identify residents?
No. Butlr Care is anonymous by design. Sensors are camera-free and capture no images, video, audio, or personally identifiable information. The system understands presence, posture, and activity from body heat alone.
Does Butlr Care use cameras?
No. There are no cameras at any point in the system, in any space, including bathrooms.
Does the app show a thermal image of the resident?
No. The Care app does not display raw thermal footage or a thermal image of a resident, in either the live view or event history. Your team sees an abstracted, anonymized view of activity, such as where an event happened and what type it was.
What hardware does Butlr Care need?
Butlr Care runs on Gen-3 hardware: wired Heatic™ 3 sensors and at least one Hive gateway. Sensors are ceiling mounted for indoor use.
Is Butlr Care available now?
Butlr Care is available through an early-access program to a limited number of pilot communities. Contact the Butlr team to discuss a pilot for your community.
Can Butlr Care work with our nurse-call system or records?
Butlr is API-first and supports integrations through APIs and webhooks. Integrations such as nurse-call and record-keeping connections are in development, and what is possible depends on the systems your community uses. Your Butlr contact can walk through the current options.
Can our team rely on Butlr Care as the only way to monitor residents?
No. Butlr Care supports your team; it does not replace it. Your community is responsible for monitoring residents, verifying any alert before acting on it, and providing care and emergency response. Butlr does not monitor resident activity on your behalf and does not notify emergency responders. Care should be used alongside your existing care practices and safety systems, not in place of them.
What happens if the network goes down?
Butlr Care depends on network connectivity at the site to move data from the sensors to the cloud. If Wi-Fi, cellular, or wired connectivity is interrupted or unavailable, Care may be delayed, impaired, or unable to report until connectivity is restored. Keeping site connectivity healthy is part of running the system well.
What data should we put into Butlr Care?
None that identifies a resident. Butlr's sensors capture no personally identifiable information, and the platform is not designed to hold protected health information (PHI) or other regulated resident data. Do not enter resident health records or personal identifiers into the system. Your community remains responsible for its own compliance obligations, including under HIPAA.
Is Butlr Care a medical device?
Important. Butlr Care is an ambient monitoring aid that supports care teams. It is not a medical device, it does not provide medical diagnosis or treatment, and it is not a substitute for professional clinical judgment, in-person care, or a certified nurse-call or emergency-response system. It is not designed or intended for life-saving, life-sustaining, emergency, or other high-risk use. Detection capabilities such as fall awareness are designed to help teams respond sooner and should be used alongside, not in place of, a community's existing care and safety practices.
Where to Go Next
To learn more or start a conversation about Butlr Care for your community, contact the Butlr team:
- Michael Marriott, Senior Enterprise Account Executive: michael@butlr.io
For more on Butlr's platform and sensing technology, see the Platform Overview and Heatic™ Technology Basics sections in Get Started.
Use of Butlr Care is governed by the Butlr Customer Agreement, including the Butlr Care Terms and Conditions.
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.