Emergency Call Systems for Retirement Villages

Twenty years later with approximately 500 Retirement Villages and similar Aged Care environments using our products and systems, we can also lay claim to having retained the position of market leader (by a significant margin) in this highly professional and specialised industry.

Looking backwards prior to 1990 the popular Village resident care solution was for the resident to use a 27Mhz unsupervised one-way wireless trigger to the site's live-in carer's pager. This comprised the resident's modified wireless garage door controller which communicated to the system head-end on-site paging system via site repeaters.

Surprisingly some Village operators continue to use this comparatively ancient technique risking the resident's safety along with their risk of litigation due to non compliance with Standard AS4607 – “Personal Response Systems”.

Now looking forward, we see new digital technology being introduced which will have particular impact on new ‘Greenfield' village sites where the laying of traditional PSTN copper connections will be replaced with Fibre to the premises (FTTP). Similarly the introduction of the National Broadband Network (NBN) will be impacting on various public locations as part of the ever growing rollout of FTTP connections.

There is yet another emerging situation whereby, almost surreptitiously, wireless interconnection from the home's normal cable entry point to the nearest Telco wireless access point (WAP) will increasingly be used for add-on client telephone connections where sufficient copper infrastructure is not available or uneconomical to provide.

Such WAP connections are proving to be a problem in the safe communication of emergency-call protocols that rely of analogue delivery of DTMF tones and precise handshake and kiss-off timings.

In summary the industry now faces three simultaneously used technologies. (a) Infinitely ongoing need for the current analogue telephone products currently connected to the existing and ongoing analogue PSTN and PABX circuits (b) Wireless GSM interconnection where there is insufficient copper connections and (c) FTTP for ‘Greenfield' sites.

Each of the latter techniques present some new difficulties for aged care implementation, however, as suppliers of solutions with safe and Standard's compliant outcomes, Smart-Caller continues to lead the way in the safe utilisation of these emerging technologies.

This web site includes Datasheets, White Papers and FAQ answers covering all of the above matters. The site also includes latest solutions for the continued utilization of copper analogue services plus solutions for supervised wireless GSM, Ethernet IP and VoIP (or all and any combinations hereof within a single product if necessary). The web site also includes specifications and guidelines along with illustrated descriptive catalogues showing indicative purchase prices.

Registered access to the agents and consultants section also provides additional product and system specifications, technical handbooks, system design assistance and price information.