UQAM University Selects Matrox Monarch HD H.264 Encoders as Best-in-class
By Jim Bask
Monarch HD streaming and recording appliance aids behaviour analysis research in psychology clinic’s observation rooms
Small, private, cozy rooms. Cameras on. Lights on. As senior psychology students delve into the secret minds and emotions of their patients, the interactions are streamed live to distant observation rooms where supervisors unobtrusively view the sessions in progress. At the same time, they are recorded to a secure, remote network location for later review.
UQAM is a French-language public university in Montreal, Canada with international outreach that provides unique programs and advanced research often linked with social concerns. The Centre de Services Psychologiques (CSP) clinic offers one such program where senior students acting as interns consult with real patients. Every session in the CSP’s 23 consultation rooms is recorded for medico-legal policy adherence and training purposes.
Since the consultations are considered medical acts, privacy is a main concern for the center. With their prior recording setups in every room of an analog SD camera connected to a DVD writer or a game capture device with a USB key, privacy protection was not assured. Other problems included faulty DVDs and USB devices, poor quality audio and video, and accidental loss of data, which made for an unreliable media system. These issues impelled UQAM to consider new ways of acquiring and managing their media.
“We checked out the specifications of many devices, ranging from in-computer encoder cards to self-contained devices and found the Matrox Monarch HD interesting for this project. We initially looked at it as an equivalent to the game capture devices, since it could record directly to a USB drive and had a fairly unbeatable price point. We soon realized, however, that its remote recording capability was the key to solving our privacy problem,” said Dominic Besner, Director of Operations, Audiovisual and Multimedia Technical Support at UQAM….[continue reading]