Local School Enlists The Office People's AI Solution to Detect Vaping and Bullying in Bathrooms

Christ Our King-Stella Maris School, a Roman Catholic parochial elementary and middle school in Mount Pleasant, SC has installed bathroom sensors to trigger alerts about vaping and bullying.

Schools across the nation have been removing bathroom doors, posting bathroom monitors, and even closing bathrooms in their struggles to handle the surging popularity of vaping among middle school and high school students.

Christ Our King wanted to get ahead of the trend by enlisting The Office People's Artificial Intelligence solutions. The Office People quickly installed and integrated their AI-assisted detectors capable of alerting teachers and administrators to suspected vaping or bullying in bathrooms.

Other schools are quickly catching on. Over 400 detectors were shipped out last month and four school districts in Florida and California have gone all out to become “full-deployment districts” using the detection system. The 2017 National Youth Tobacco Survey found that approximately 2.1 million students had used e-cigarettes.

The device uses machine-learning AI that has been trained to detect the water vapor signature coming from vaping pens, e-cigarettes, and other vaping paraphernalia. Most vaping devices popular among students consist of a flavored vaping liquid—sometimes called “vape juice”—that includes a hefty dose of addictive nicotine. Once installed, each device can learn the baseline patterns of water vapor in a given bathroom so that the system’s thresholds for what counts as an anomaly can be adjusted accordingly.

The system generally achieves a vaping detection accuracy of between 70 and 80 percent, and that the system has helped schools achieve a 70 percent decrease, on average, in vaping incidents at locations where the system is installed.

Schools that install detectors in their bathrooms get access to an automated cloud platform that tracks the data being collected by the detector and manages the alert system. School administrators can even manage the system so that only specific teachers will receive alerts on their phones from certain detectors.

The dual-purpose mission of detector means that it also can keep watch for bullying or fighting by detecting sound levels based on decibels. Between one-quarter and one-third of U.S. students report being bullied at school. It’s an issue that likely affects millions of students each year. If the sounds in a bathroom or locker room exceed a certain sound threshold—something that can be adjusted by school administrators—it can trigger a similar mobile alert that could prompt a principal or teacher to go investigate. At the same time, the system’s lack of natural-language recognition or identification of voices belonging to particular individuals is meant to avoid student privacy concerns.

If your school or organization is interested in learning more about this product or other Smart Office Solutions, contact The Office People today at 843-769-7774.