space. It hasn’t completely taken hold
yet, but it’s getting there.”
That said, neither Taylor nor Rogers
expects the less flashy forms of com-
munication, like pagers and two-way
radios, that are often integrated into a
life-safety solution to fall by the wayside
anytime soon.
In fact, Rogers says he knows of
“a lot of caregivers who are carrying
around two-way radios in addition to a
pager or a phone so they can have voice
communication either with their peers
or the outside world.”
A similar number of caregivers, he
adds, continue to walk around their
communities with wireless handsets,
which can be used in various ways to
alert caregivers if a particular life-safety
system has been activated.
“It’s all about finding ways for caregivers to be notified about an alarm
while they’re mobile,” Rogers says,
“because most of them aren’t just sitting at the desk waiting for a call to
come in. They’re always on the move,
taking care of residents, and they need
to be able to receive those notifications
while they’re doing that.”
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tech choices
Of course, every new technology has
its pros and cons. Life-safety providers
and their customers have to pick and
choose what options best fit a given
need.
Frisco, Texas-based EmFinders is
a good example. The company’s Em-SeeQ, a wearable device that looks a lot
like a watch, uses cellular rather than
GPS technology to determine a missing or wandering resident’s location.
“If you’ve ever been in a car with
satellite radio, driven it into a garage,
and, poof, [the radio signal is] gone,
you know why we didn’t use GPS technology—because it’s the same thing,”
says Jim Nalley, senior vice president
and co-founder of EmFinders.
“The satellites [used by GPS sys-
tems] are in the sky, so when you’re
indoors or in a garage or in a heavily
wooded area, the satellites can’t see
you,” he says. “And when they can’t
see you, the system relying on them
isn’t going to work.”
That’s not the only reason EmFind-
ers executives went with cellular while
designing their product, though; ac-
cording to Nalley, the choice allows
the company to eke a bit more battery
life out of its products than it would
otherwise.
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Metrics, Metrics Everywhere
Another trend makers of life-safety solutions have noticed over the last few
years: “More and more of our clients
want to be able to look across their
communities and compare and contrast them,” says Rogers.
Beekman has noticed the same
thing. “They want to know which of
their buildings have a higher tendency
of falls, what’s the average response
time for a nurse call across all of their
buildings, that sort of thing,” he says
of his senior living customers.
The life-safety products produced by
