The Crisis and an Unconventional Idea
Back in those early pandemic days, hospitals like Mount Sinai in New York were overwhelmed. Critical patients were filling every bed, and doctors and nurses were stretched thin. Worse, personal protective equipment (PPE) was in short supply worldwide. Every time a nurse entered a COVID patient’s room to check vitals or communicate, they used up precious PPE and put themselves at risk. I remember seeing news of health workers reusing masks and even making difficult choices about how often they could safely check on patients. Front-line staff also feared the virus’s "viral load" effect - essentially, the more times they had to go in and be exposed, the more likely they could get sick. We needed a way to care for isolated patients without constant direct contact, both to reduce infection risk and to stretch the limited PPE.
That’s when a few people at Google Nest and clinicians at Mount Sinai came up with an unconventional idea: use Nest Cams, the little smart home cameras people use to watch their pets or front doors, inside hospital rooms to remotely monitor patients. It sounded a bit crazy at first. Nest Cams weren’t medical devices; they were consumer gadgets. But the situation was desperate, and sometimes the best solutions in a crisis are the creative ones. The Mount Sinai team was eager to try anything that could give caregivers a virtual "window" into patient rooms. So our Google Nest team partnered with them to make it happen.
A Family Divided, a Shared Purpose
While I was in California, my parents were in India, and like many families during the pandemic, we were separated by oceans and uncertainty. My mom, ever resourceful, pulled out her old sewing machine and started making cloth masks at home. She stitched hundreds of them and handed them out to front-line workers, grocery store employees, and neighbors in our hometown. It was her way of helping, and it deeply inspired me. I remember talking to her over video calls and feeling proud but also restless. I was trying to figure out what I could do from my end. When this project came up, it felt like my answer.
Building a “Virtual PPE” System with Nest Cameras
We had to move fast. In just a few weeks, working remotely from our homes, we developed a system to turn Nest Cams into inpatient monitoring devices. Mount Sinai started installing two Nest cameras in over a hundred COVID-19 patient rooms : one camera trained on the patient (so staff could see and talk to them), and another pointed at the vital monitors in the room. The video feeds from these cameras streamed to a secure, purpose-built console at the nurses’ station. This way, a nurse could check on any patient from outside the room and even communicate via the camera’s two-way audio. It was essentially an electronic PPE (some called it "ePPE"), a way to be present with the patient without physically entering the room each time.
As a technical lead on the project, I helped design the system so that all video remained within the hospital’s network - nothing was stored in the cloud or sent to Google’s servers. Specifically, we:
Locked access to the hospital’s secure network: The camera console could only be accessed from within Mount Sinai’s network (we enforced IP/subnet restrictions). If you weren’t onsite or on the hospital’s WPA2 encrypted WiFi, you couldn’t connect.
Required hospital logins: To view any video, a user had to sign in with their Mount Sinai Google account. This ensured that only authorized clinicians with proper credentials could view a camera feed.
Hardened the connection: All data streaming was encrypted, and we disabled any Nest cloud features that weren’t needed. The solution adhered to HIPAA and hospital privacy policies, which meant working closely with Google’s legal and privacy teams on every detail.
Making an impact
This project was unlike any other I’ve been part of. It wasn’t about launching a new consumer feature or product; it was literally about saving lives (or at least saving someone from getting infected). Looking back, it was amazing how barriers that might normally slow a project down were overcome in record time because everyone was motivated to protect patients and staff.
Within a month or so, Mount Sinai’s "Nest cam monitoring" system was up and running. The project also didn’t stop at Mount Sinai. Google ended up donating around 10,000 Nest Cams and consoles to hospitals across the U.S., scaling out this solution to many other overwhelmed facilities.
Our work even caught some public attention. The story was featured on Google’s official blog and got picked up by tech news. Later on, a group of Mount Sinai clinicians wrote a peer reviewed study about the whole initiative that was published in JAMIA (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association). I was humbled to read that paper and see quotes from nurses and staff about the solution. They even mentioned how the Google team "worked with us over nights and weekends". LOL. It’s not often that the code you write ends up in a medical journal! Google was super nice to appreciate the people who worked on the project internally. I received the Google HOW award from SVP Rick Osterloh.
I feel incredibly grateful to have played a small part from behind my keyboard. It took a whole team, many teams, really to make this happen, and I’m proud of what we had accomplished together. In the end, it wasn’t about Nest cams or fancy tech at all; it was about caring for patients and supporting heroes on the front lines. And if I’m ever asked what the most meaningful project of my career has been, I know my answer without hesitation.