With the telecare market in Europe growing at a CAGR of 8.4 percent from 2023 to 2028, the business opportunities for alarm service providers entering this market are significant.
But how can an alarm service provider that wants to enter this market start to receive alarms from telecare devices? To answer that question we need to dive into the area of alarm protocols. This is what this blog is all about, and we’ll start by looking at what SCAIP is, then SIA DC-09 (SIA DCS).
Social Care Alarm Internet Protocol (SCAIP) is originally a Swedish development that has evolved into a European standard named CENELEC 50134-9. It is the most used digital alarm communication protocol for modern technology enabled care, and the primary telecare protocol throughout Europe.
SCAIP is based on the SIP protocol and handles point-to-point transmission of alarms, faults, control signal and communications monitoring, between care units and an ARC.
SIA DC-09 (SIA DCS) is a standard that defines the protocol of how to report and respond to alarm events between devices and platforms over an IP network. When an alarm is triggered, a message is sent to the receiver using the SIA DC-09 (SIA DCS) standard. The message includes information about the event, and the receiver uses this information to determine how to respond.
The SIA standard is widely used by alarm receiving centres (ARC) to receive alarms from devices and sensors of a broad range of security applications such as burglar alarms, fire detection, low battery warnings and many more.
For ARCs offering its alarm solution and services based on the SIA DC-09 (SIA DCS) standard, an expansion into an adjacent segment, such as the telecare segment would broaden their addressable market and offer new business opportunities. Telecare solutions in Europe have an expected market value reaching EUR 5.2 billion in 2028 and a CAGR at 8.4 percent from 2023 to 2028*, why an entry into the sector could represent a significant revenue potential for SIA-enabled ARCs.
To enter the telecare market and offer alarm services to the segment, support for SCAIP is required.
Today, only niche-players in care offer support for SCAIP devices, hence the opportunity for providers of SIA-enabled alarm services to grasp a bit of the growing telecare market is significant. However, investing in and implementing yet another alarm receiving platform for the ability to receive SCAIP alarms from telecare devices doesn’t make economical or operational sense. Adding support for SCAIP to the existing SIA-enabled ARC platform is a more economically viable option.
* Berginsight.com – The Telecare Market in Europe and North America, Mar 2024
The iotcomms.io cloud-native Alarmbridge offering is easily integrated into an existing ARC platform. Alarmbridge is a cloud service sitting between the telecare devices and the ARC and receives the SCAIP alarm from the telecare device, maps the properties of the SCAIP alarm event to a SIA DCS event and sends it to the ARC as is showed below.
Alarmbridge uses a set of built-in rules to perform when mapping the protocol properties from SCAIP to SIA DCS. The protocol conversion capability of Alarmbridge offers SIA-enabled ARCs an easy way to receive alarms from SCAIP-based telecare devices without any hardware or operational hassle.
Alarmbridge, including its conversion capability, is delivered as a cloud service and all telecom complexities involved with secure and reliable end-to-end communication between telecare devices and the ARC is taken care of.
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