TribLive: “After two people incarcerated in an Alabama county jail died from a drug overdose a few years ago, leadership there sought a way to prevent such incidents.

While touring another Alabama facility, they discovered OverWatch, a wearable device that monitors heart rate, oxygen saturation levels, sleep, temperature, motion and stress levels.

Placed on people in the jail who are medically vulnerable — such as those suffering from severe cardiac disease, detoxing from drug or alcohol addiction or having suicidal ideations — the devices transfer the data to monitoring stations. If there’s a critical incident, the device alerts jail staff on a computer dashboard that’s monitored 24/7….

Those kinds of success stories are what led Allegheny County officials recently to buy 100 OverWatch devices, which were rolled out in the Pittsburgh jail last week.

They are currently being used on 13 people with serious health concerns. The jail population on Friday was 1,688….

Tanisha Long, an advocate with the Abolitionist Law Center who volunteers at the jail, is skeptical of the program.

‘I’m not a fan of this,’ she said. ‘This is another piece of surveillance technology under the guise of safety and wellness.'”

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