Content provided by Reassurance Solutions
By Jon Lloyd, president, Reassurance Solutions
It was one month after Cass County Jail in Fargo, North Dakota installed the XK300 sensors. An inmate had just been medically cleared and placed in an intake cell. Within minutes – not an hour and not after the next scheduled check – the sensor issued an alert: abnormal respirations. Staff rushed in. The inmate was in agonal breathing. His pulse was lost moments later.
CPR. Narcan. Emergency response. He was revived in the cell and transported to the hospital. He survived.
“The sensor alert enabled our on-duty staff to begin providing care that revived this inmate,” said Captain Andrew Frobig, jail administrator for the Cass County Sheriff’s Office. “Without the benefit of the XK300 sensor, the next scheduled check about 10 minutes later very likely would have been too late to recognize the emergency.”
Ten minutes. That’s the gap between the life-safety system that was in place and the life that was saved. And here’s what makes this story even more instructive: Nothing about this inmate flagged him as high-risk. He’d been medically cleared. Enhanced monitoring protocols were already in place. None of it was enough. A sensor that never blinks, never takes a break and never goes off shift caught what human observation couldn’t.
That’s not an argument against human judgment. It’s an argument for something every corrections professional already understands in their bones: No single system, no matter how good, is enough on its own.
The backup you already believe in
Ask any experienced corrections officer what they carry on shift. They’ll give you a list: A radio. A baton. Pepper spray. A vest. Maybe a tourniquet. Not because they expect to need all of it on a given Tuesday. But because in a correctional environment, the cost of being wrong is too high to leave anything to chance.
The same philosophy governs everything else in a well-run facility. Backup generators for power failures. Redundant communications for emergencies. Multiple response protocols for a single incident type. This isn’t pessimism. It’s the professional standard that has kept officers safe and facilities accountable for decades.
So why would anyone approach inmate health monitoring differently?
Every technology has limits, without exception. Fixed sensors cover fixed spaces. Wearables depend on the person wearing them. Medical staff can’t be everywhere. Rounds happen on schedules. The human body doesn’t. Overdoses don’t. Cardiac events don’t.
Frobig understood this when Cass County made the decision to equip all intake cells, not just a few, with XK300 sensors. “There were no indications ahead of time that would have caused our staff to put this particular inmate under this monitoring system if it was limited to only one or two cells,” he said. “It has probably already paid for itself considering the potential outcome if we had not installed this system.”
What fixed sensors do better than anything else
The XK300 contactless radar sensor does one thing with exceptional reliability: It monitors the person in the cell, continuously, without asking anything of them or the staff.
Mounted on a wall or ceiling, it captures heart rate, respiratory rate, motion and presence by detecting micro- and nanovibrational patterns in the room, including those produced by the human body. If anything changes by as much as 0.1 millimeter, it alerts. It requires no compliance from the inmate. There’s nothing to remove, tamper with or damage. It generates 6,000 to 10,000 measurements a day without adding a single task to an officer’s workload. It is FDA-cleared, backed by 30 patents and more than seven years of peer-reviewed research, and has been validated in correctional facilities across more than 25 states.
At Walker County Jail in Alabama, a sensor detected a critical drop in an inmate’s vital signs and triggered an alert through the monitoring dashboard. Body camera footage captured the officer’s rapid response. The inmate survived. At Kenton County Detention Center in Kentucky, a deputy was walking away from a man who’d been medically evaluated and returned to his cell when an alert sounded. “At that point he had overdosed,” recalled Colonel Trey Smith, the center’s chief of operations. Narcan was administered. He survived. “If the officer had just put him back in the cell and gone about his day and come back 10 minutes later to check on him,” Smith said, “who knows?”
Who knows? That’s the phrase that keeps correctional administrators up at night. And it’s the phrase a well-designed monitoring system is built to eliminate.
“We have determined the XK300 is a powerful tool for the early detection of abnormal vital signs in patients,” said Shawnee Ray, R.N., a nurse at Kenton County. “This device has already demonstrated its effectiveness on multiple occasions, notably in critical situations involving overdose and cardiac events.”
Where fixed sensors have limits, and what closes the gap
A wall-mounted sensor monitors a room. It doesn’t follow a person to a common area, a medical exam room or a hallway. That is not a flaw in the technology. It is physics. And it’s the same gap that exists with security cameras, officer patrol routes and every other fixed monitoring system in a correctional facility.
The answer has never been to find a perfect single technology. The answer has always been coverage that overlaps.
That’s why Reassurance Solutions developed the ReassureBand, a wearable monitoring device built specifically for correctional environments. Where the XK300 monitors the space, the ReassureBand monitors the person. Vital signs, movement and location data travel with the individual from intake to housing to medical to wherever they are in the facility. Together, both data streams feed into a single unified dashboard, giving officers and medical staff one coherent picture of health and safety across the entire building.
This matters most at the moments of greatest danger. Intake is the highest-risk window in an inmate’s time in custody. Someone who has been using drugs, is entering withdrawal or has an undisclosed medical condition may appear stable during an initial screening and deteriorate within the hour. A wearable that stays with that person from the booking area to the medical observation cell to general population provides a continuous thread of visibility no fixed sensor can replicate. The XK300 picks up the emergencies that happen in the cell. The ReassureBand catches what happens everywhere else.
No gaps. No handoffs between systems. One alert infrastructure, with two layers of coverage working in parallel.
One dashboard, two layers, one mission
There’s a practical objection experienced administrators raise whenever new technology enters a facility: complexity. Staff attention is finite. Training time is limited. The last thing a busy facility needs is two separate systems requiring two separate training programs, two separate vendor relationships and two separate alert infrastructures pulling officers in different directions.
The Reassurance Solutions platform was designed with that objection in mind. The XK300 and ReassureBand both feed into one dashboard. One set of alerts. One training program. One vendor to call. Adding a second layer of monitoring doesn’t add operational complexity. It expands coverage within an interface the team already knows.
That unified approach also matters for something correctional administrators think about constantly but don’t always say out loud: liability. When an inmate dies in custody, the questions that follow are predictable. What monitoring was in place? What did staff know, and when did they know it? What could have been detected earlier? A layered monitoring system with a documented record of alerts, responses and outcomes is a far stronger answer to those questions than any single technology, or no technology at all.
In Kentucky, jailers are elected. They answer to their communities directly. “We regularly have members from our community tour the facility, and we always tell them about this technology we have to try to safeguard human life,” said Smith. “They’re always shocked: ‘Wow, we didn’t realize this type of technology even existed.’”
That’s not just good public relations. That’s a sheriff demonstrating, with documented results, that his facility takes its duty of care seriously. That’s what technology that actually works in the field looks like.
The right question to ask
The correctional technology market is not short on vendors who will tell you their approach is the best approach. Some will point to the limitations of technologies other than their own. Evaluate those claims carefully. The limitations they’re describing are often real. Every wireless protocol has constraints in a concrete and steel environment. Every sensing modality has a range. Every technology has a scenario in which it underperforms.
That’s not a reason to choose sides. It’s a reason to build a system where the gaps in one layer are covered by another.
The right question isn’t, “Which technology is best?” The right question is, “Where are my gaps, and what closes them?”
A facility that’s honest about answering that question will almost never land on a single-technology solution. Because the gaps in any one system, the blind spots and coverage failures and moments where conditions outpace design, are exactly what kill people. Not negligence. Not indifference. Gaps.
Closing those gaps is what Reassurance Solutions was built to do.
Today, the platform is deployed in more than 160 facilities across more than 28 states. The saves are documented. The interventions are real. And the cases from Hong Kong to Kentucky to North Dakota to Alabama all tell the same story: The person who survived was the one whose facility didn’t bet everything on a single layer of protection.
“There’s no silver bullet in vital sign monitoring technology, so we make sure our facilities are carrying a full clip,” said Jon Lloyd, president of Reassurance Solutions. “Fewer blind spots means greater peace of mind for inmates, fewer surprises for officers, less liability for facilities. No standalone product can provide that on its own.”
A fighting chance – that’s what redundancy gives you.
For more information, visit reassurancesolutions.com or contact Jon Lloyd to learn how the Reassurance Solutions platform is protecting facilities nationwide.
