Looking Back on Our Open Day in Belgium: Strong Engagement Around AI Supporting Care

We recently had the pleasure of organizing an open day at Woonzorgcentrum Marialove (Curando Group) in Zwevegem, in the Flemish region of Belgium, to present Orikio, which has been used within the facility for several months as a support tool for resident safety and care.

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This event provided an opportunity to demonstrate our AI and sound-analysis based intelligent detection solution in real-life conditions, while also sharing initial field feedback with healthcare and care sector professionals.

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Throughout the discussions, several important observations emerged. In some care units, particularly those supporting people living with cognitive disorders or neurodegenerative diseases, residents are not always able to call for help themselves in the event of a fall, respiratory distress or another unusual situation. As a result, care teams may sometimes only discover these situations during routine rounds, potentially long after the incident occurred.

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The objective of Orikio is to provide professionals with an additional layer of support through earlier detection of potentially critical situations, enabling faster intervention when needed. The goal is not to replace human caregivers, but to equip teams with an additional tool to help secure care pathways and improve responsiveness during critical moments.

Questions related to privacy and ethics also played a central role during the open day. Participants had the opportunity to discuss the practical functioning of the solution and the safeguards implemented by our teams. Unlike video surveillance systems, the technology relies exclusively on sound signal analysis and does not use any cameras.

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The discussions also provided an opportunity to reaffirm several key principles behind our approach:

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• no continuous audio recordings are stored;
• data is analyzed in real time;
• the system automatically pauses certain analyses when conversations are detected;
• data security and regulatory compliance remain ongoing priorities for our teams.

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A special thank you goes to the teams and management of Woonzorgcentrum Marialove, as well as the Curando Group, for their trust, hospitality and commitment to innovation in care. Their day-to-day involvement helps bring forward practical, meaningful and deeply human-centered uses of technology.

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We would also like to thank the twenty participants who attended the event for the quality of the discussions, the thoughtful questions raised and the interest shown in the human, organizational and ethical challenges surrounding artificial intelligence in the care sector.

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We would like to warmly thank HLN and journalist Laura Wellens for attending the event and for highlighting, through their article, the key questions raised by this experimentation: how can we strengthen the safety of the most vulnerable residents while preserving their privacy, dignity and daily freedom?

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Finally, congratulations to the Orikio teams involved in this open day, who presented not only the solution and its practical applications, but also the broader aspects of our work: quality processes, certifications, data security, regulatory challenges and our vision of responsible innovation in healthcare and care services.

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These moments of dialogue are essential to collectively building technologies that are useful, respectful and aligned with the realities of care professionals and residents alike.