SAN DIEGO — As part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of deaths in custody, the San Diego Sheriff’s Office will soon begin testing biometric monitoring devices designed to alert staff when someone in jail is in medical distress.

Speaking at a meeting of the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board on Thursday, Sheriff Kelly Martinez said her department plans to pilot the devices at the downtown Central Jail and at the Las Colinas women’s jail “in the next few weeks.”

This follows an earlier pilot program, first announced in October 2022, that ended because of problems with the devices.

“Short battery life, the cumbersome size of the equipment and lack of capability in monitoring were our reasons for discontinuing the pilot,” sheriff’s spokesperson Lt. David Collins told The San Diego Union-Tribune in a recent email.

In the years since, manufacturer 4Sight Labs “has made significant improvements, and many of the previously identified issues have been remedied,” Collins said.

At the CLERB meeting, Martinez described the device as being “more like an Apple Watch.”

It measures vital signs, such as heart rate and respiration, and is designed to send an alert to medical staff if a person’s condition suddenly changes.

“Someone in their cell in the middle of the night has a heart attack — we don’t see them until we do a cell check,” she said. “These devices theoretically alert us that someone’s heart has stopped, or that they’re in medical distress, so we can move to that person immediately.”

While proponents of wearable technology in prisons and jails have described it as potentially lifesaving, privacy rights groups and even law enforcement officials say the devices can raise ethical and legal concerns and urge agencies to establish strict rules on data use, retention and consent.

Martinez said the new pilot will begin with a small group of volunteers identified as medically vulnerable and emphasized that any use of the device must be consensual.

While the Sheriff’s Office sees promise in wearable health technology, Martinez said the county’s aging jails make implementation difficult. The buildings’ concrete walls and limited wiring complicate Wi-Fi coverage and data transmission.

“We just spent $16 million on Wi-Fi upgrades,” she said. “The facilities weren’t built for the types of technology that we want to deploy.”

She added that the department’s IT division has had to invent many of its own tools — including a phone app that gives deputies instant access to the medical records of people they’re checking on — because few companies develop products for correctional settings.

CLERB first recommended that the Sheriff’s Office look into wearable health monitors in April 2022, a recommendation the sheriff agreed with before finding that the technology was unworkable.

This week, CLERB recommended the department “institute the use of technology to monitor the health and safety of people in custody” following its review of the death of Keith Bach.

Bach, who had Type 1 diabetes, relied on an insulin pump and told a nurse during booking that it would soon run out.

Records show that medical staff repeatedly failed to administer his scheduled insulin doses.

The summary of CLERB’s investigation also suggests that Bach refused insulin twice. But the board’s investigators found that medical staff never directly spoke with him, obtained his signature on a medication refusal form or immediately alerted a doctor or nurse practitioner to his refusal as required by policy.

Martinez said the Sheriff’s Office is exploring other types of biometric monitoring that don’t require a wearable device.

“There’s not a lot on the market focused on this population,” she said. “But we’re looking at it all the time.”

©2025 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.