Why cameras are popping up in eldercare facilities: Roughly 20 states now have laws permitting families to place cameras in the rooms of loved ones.

The assisted-living facility in Edina, Minnesota, where Jean H. Peters and her siblings moved their mother in 2011, looked lovely. “But then you start uncovering things,” Peters said.

Her mother, Jackie Hourigan, widowed and developing memory problems at 82, too often was still in bed when her children came to see her in midmorning.

“She wasn’t being toileted, so her pants would be soaked,” said Peters, 69, a retired nurse-practitioner in Bloomington, Minnesota. “They didn’t give her water. They didn’t get her up for meals.” She dwindled to 94 pounds.

Most ominously, Peters said, “we noticed bruises on her arm that we couldn’t account for.” Complaints to administrators — in person, by phone and by email — brought “tons of excuses.”

So Peters bought an inexpensive camera at Best Buy. She and her sisters installed it atop the refrigerator in her mother’s apartment, worrying that the facility might evict her if the staff noticed it.

Monitoring from an app on their phones, the family saw Hourigan going hours without being changed. They saw and heard an aide loudly berating her and handling her roughly as she helped her dress.

They watched as another aide awakened her for breakfast and left the room even though Hourigan was unable to open the heavy apartment door and go to the dining room. “It was traumatic to learn that we were right,” Peters said.

In 2016, after filing a police report and a lawsuit, and after her mother’s death, Peters helped found Elder Voice Advocates, which lobbied for a state law permitting cameras in residents’ rooms in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. Minnesota passed it in 2019.