Alarm Services
The challenges group living schemes face as the shut-down of the analogue network approaches
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22 March, 2024
Recently, I was participating in a webinar discussing “Analogue to Digital Alarm Management – Navigating the UK 2025 Switchover”.
The move from analogue to digital-based alarm communication creates challenges for Alarm Receiving Centres (ARCs), telecare providers, and group living schemes that must be addressed and solved before the PSTN shut-down 2025.
Below are my answers and reflections on the questions we discussed during the webinar.
A: Alarm communication, as we know it today, is the ability to establish communication end-to-end between a device (could be a telecare device, but it could also be an elevator’s emergency panel or a front-door intercom panel) and an ARC.
Alarm communication tomorrow, however, is more than this. I think we all need to be aware of that communication patterns will change significantly over time. An alarm event is often the trigger of some sort of communication, for example a fall sensor triggering a camera to stream video to a health care worker, a nurse or similar, or establishing a separate voice session between the elderly and his/her next of kin.
So, while alarm communication today is focused on the analogue to digital transition, it is important to keep in mind that with new and more advanced use cases coming it is absolutely crucial to have a modern system. In this context a cloud-based VoIP backend has what is required to meet and embrace the new telecare era.
A: The installations today typically include customer placed hardware, often have a monolithic-built software structure and are often a closed or proprietary system.
A cloud-based alarm service has no customer placed hardware and is built with loosely coupled services – also called microservices. In a modern telecare environment open and vendor independent systems are offered which presents a whole new level of flexibility and freedom of choice.
The iotcomms.io platform and its alarm communication service is cloud-native and truly agnostic to alarm protocols, devices and ARCs. It is deployed in the public cloud, AWS, but a hybrid cloud-edge deployment model is also offered, which provides extra flexibility.
A: The benefits of buying alarm services as a cloud service are many; unlimited and effortless scalability, no hardware hassle, quick introduction of new capabilities and faster time to market are some of the key values.
The iotcomms.io platform is built with small loosely coupled services which speeds up any upgrade, update, and new feature can be instantly introduced.
Another benefit with a cloud-based service is the pay-for-what-you-use model.
A: In the short term, I’d say they need to find a way to mitigate the challenges that the PSTN shut-down causes with some sort of bridging solution.
In the longer term, however, they need to find a solution that lets them embrace the future of telecare. The increased amount of new devices that are entering the market, such as sensors, fire alarms, and fall detectors, all will trigger alarms and thus put new requirements and adds complexity to the alarm communication.
The continues protocol fragmentation in the telecare sector is another thing that creates challenges. Our advice here is to think big and to make sure to have the possibility to easily add support for additional protocols, and an ability to receive alarms from other than the traditional care devices.
With a modern VoIP backend inside an alarm solution the opportunities are endless when it comes to development and support for more advanced use cases. However, deep telecom competence is required, and it’s often not the core competency of alarm solution providers.
A: The key challenge is the increased number of unsuccessful alarm calls. I’ll give a bit of background to explain this problem; most telecare devices in Europe are analogue, and when they were introduced in the market they fitted well with the analogue capable ARC platforms and analogue phone lines. The entire telecare communication system was built for analogue equipment and networks.
In the future it will be an all-digital environment, but until we get there, we will have a period with a mixture of analogue and digital equipment. In this mixed environment it is challenging for ARC platform providers to ensure successful transmission of alarm calls, and as a result we see an increased number of unsuccessful alarm calls.
With a modern cloud-based service such as iotcomms.io’s, tweaks are easier made to compensate for and mitigate these network challenges. In hardware or software monoliths this is much harder to achieve.
A: The short answer is no! My experience from the Swedish PSTN closing is that there is no half-way closing.
Network providers’ savings are only first realized when the local telephone switch has been completely switched off, all users removed, and the power withdrawn.
In summary – the problem won’t go away, so you better do something!
If you want to listen to the recording of the webinar, please go here.
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