Too often analogue-based care alarm calls don’t get through successfully to the alarm receiving center (ARC). Even if, let’s say 95% of care alarm calls are successful, it still means that 5% are not. Unsuccessful care alarm calls can have devastating consequences which are hard to quantify, but they also represent significant time and cost for alarm service providers that need to follow-up the unsuccessful calls.
An alarm can be triggered for different reasons. It can be a life-threatening emergency, it can be service related, e.g., low battery, or it can be related to reaching threshold levels in various kinds of sensors etc. Regardless of which, mitigating and reducing unsuccessful alarm calls can save both money and lives.
This blog post looks into the problem of unsuccessful care alarm calls. What is an unsuccessful care alarm call, what could potentially cause it, and what can care alarm solution providers do to mitigate them?
To explain what an unsuccessful care alarm is, let’s first look at what happens in a successful care alarm call. Again, please note that this refers to analogue-based alarm calls.
In a successful care alarm call, the alarm information is sent from the alarm device to the alarm destination i.e., either to an ARC or a contact/service center.
To enable information of an alarm to be transmitted, a call between the alarm device and the ARC must first be established. An “authentication handshake” between the device and the alarm destination is required to transmit information such as alarm code and alarm information. The alarm communication is transmitted through tones between the device and the ARC. Both endpoints must capture the information correctly for the care alarm call to be successful.
In case the alarm is caused by an emergency scenario, a subsequent voice call can be established between the voice-enabled device and the ARC. The voice call is established using the same line previously used for the alarm event.
Now, back to what an unsuccessful care alarm call is; an unsuccessful care alarm call is when the alarm information isn’t successfully received by the ARC.
Following the explanation above, a successful care alarm call is depending on the alarm device, the establishment of the call itself, and the transmission of alarm information between the alarm device and the ARC. So, the question is; why don’t the alarm information reach the ARC?
There could be many different reasons for this, anything from bad network connection to handshake problems, missing tones, misconfigured or faulty hardware, just to mention a few. A full list of all that could possibly cause a problem is beyond the scope of this blog post.
iotcomms.io has deep expertise in analogue and digital telecom technologies and protocols, and extensive experience of building reliable and real-time care alarm communication for critical applications.
Based on its cloud-native communication platform iotcomms.io offers alarm, voice, and video communication services, and runs critical alarm communication for alarm solution providers in Europe and the US.
In today’s telecare environment where analogue devices are supposed to communicate with analogue or digital ARCs over digital networks, the ability to handle tones and compensate for network noise and distortion is key. Building ARC platforms that have robustness and flexibility in the alarm receivers are vital to mitigate problems in today’s mixed analogue and digital telecare network.
Only modern cloud-based technology, such as the iotcomms.io platform, has the ability to quickly and easily make the changes and adaptations necessary to help providers tackle problems with unsuccessful alarm calls.
The cloud-native iotcomms.io platform is built with a microservice design and provides the flexibility needed to solve problems today and tomorrow.
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