Whitby Mental Health Center, Canada, is a specialist psychiatric facility. It provides an extensive range of in-patient and out-patient services for a population of 2.8 million people living in and around Toronto. The center includes an 85 bed medium to minimum security detention facility for people held under the Canadian Mental Health Act and the Criminal Code of Canada, as well as specialised out-patient services.
The use and occupancy of the facility has increased dramatically over the last 8 years. This placed increased demand on the site's security system, which needed to be upgraded. Most of the site was fitted with analogue cameras, providing a limited amount of security management options.
Whitby Mental Health Center chose to use Aimetis VMS as a powerful video platform for the upgraded security. This allowed the site to expand its CCTV coverage, make use of existing analogue cameras and add IP mega-pixel cameras to areas of high risk. It was also essential that a broad range of networked cameras could be used in the upgraded system and Aimetis VMS was able to integrate with Axis, Panasonic and IQinVision.
The large site required intelligent, PTZ tracking, as manual control was not always feasible. The Aimetis solution was configured to automatically zoom in on people in restricted areas; detect missing persons; and identify violent and dangerous behaviour. It also allowed existing analogue cameras to operate within the same system using encoders.
Whitby Mental Health Center now has a cutting edge security system, which contains many of the site's existing analogue cameras, alongside the latest IP megapixel cameras, for total site security.