Ronkonkoma, New York, Jan. 10, 2023—Soter Technologies, a leading provider of innovative environmental sensor and software technologies, today announced the release of JunoAI, its privacy-aware advanced video analytics platform that enables school administrators to proactively identify student emotional and mental states to prevent violent or dangerous behaviors. JunoAI is available immediately from Soter and its authorized resellers.
According to data from Mental Health America (www.mhanational.org), over 15 percent of youth age 12-17 suffered at least one major depressive episode in 2022, representing an increase of 300,000 episodes since 2020. Currently, nearly four million students suffer with bouts of depression, severe anxiety and other mental health issues.
JunoAI integrates with a school’s existing surveillance system by monitoring all video streams in real time. It is designed to detect changes in the emotional state of individual students, detect and report unusual activity and crowd formations, and issue alerts to personnel for immediate action. JunoAI offers a suite of interactive management tools for customization, as well as automated redaction of faces from video that must be released or shared.
“Schools in this country are facing a mental health crisis, and administrators are in need of tools that can help them identify students in crisis and offer intervention and support before things potentially take a bad turn,” said Derek Peterson, chief executive officer at Soter. “The use of privacy-aware algorithms to identify behavioral and emotional changes without resorting to invasive tracking and facial recognition technologies empowers school personnel to have a better view of what is happening on campus using infrastructure already in place.”
JunoAI employs Soter’s Anonymous Facial Extraction (SAFE) process, which enables anonymized emotional extraction and detects anomalies in an individual’s emotions over a period of time. Through SAFE, personal identity and privacy is protected. No images are stored, and the system has no access to an individual’s physical characteristics, race, gender, age, or name. When JunoAI detects an emotional or behavioral anomaly based on a series of chronological emotions stored for an individual, school personnel are alerted so they can then assess the situation and take appropriate action.
“Both in-person and online bullying has contributed to significant mental health concerns and underlying behavioral issues in nearly every school,” continued Peterson. “Providing school administrators and counselors with advance warnings about students who may be exhibiting uncharacteristic emotions or behaviors before a crisis—without violating the student’s privacy—can be helpful. JunoAI can provide early notifications that enables school personnel to quickly address an evolving situation and potentially preempt trouble, providing a safer and healthier environment for all.”
JunoAI Elements:
- Anonymous Emotional Analysis through SAFE
- Creates unique irreversible ID and tracks emotional states over time
- Recognizes, correlates, and stores emotional state data gathered from multiple video streams
- Uses AI to detect emotional or behavioral anomalies
- Issues autonomous alerts with time and location data, facilitating response
- Crowd Detection
- Detection of pre-trained patterns of crowds or activity
- Semicircle forming around a fight
- Rapid movement or formation of groups (flash mob, fleeing behavior)
- Allows adjustable parameters per camera/stream for customization
- Issues autonomous alerts with time and location
- Detection of pre-trained patterns of crowds or activity
- Redact
- Automated redaction processing of video for privacy-compliant release
- Redacted video available within minutes
- Secure redaction process prevents reversal of redactions
- Eliminates painstaking and time-consuming manual process
- Interactive tool utilizes SAFE ID to allow administrator to quickly select individuals to retain and individuals to redact or blur in a stream
- Automated redaction processing of video for privacy-compliant release
To purchase or learn more about JunoAI and Soter Technologies’ full line of school health, safety, and security solutions, please visit www.sotertechnologies.com.
About Soter Technologies
Soter Technologies is an innovative provider of cutting-edge solutions that enable customers to stay aware of environmental and behavioral threats to employees and other constituencies. Utilizing a combination of superior sensor technology and software solutions, Soter products can instantly identify environmental and social anomalies across a wide range of situations and are designed to protect classrooms, campuses, workplaces, and communities worldwide.
