Two products came to our attention this week that could improve the lives of elderly residents looking to remain living independently. The first is a tracking pendant that can detect falls, made by Laipac using Telit wireless modules. The second is a voice control system call Serwantess, which has announced that it will be integrated into a new open source smart home hub from ALYT, which will be marketed to care homes as well as affluent millennials.
M2M wireless manufacturer Telit has announced that Laipac has chosen its Jupiter JF2 and GE865 modules in its S911 Lola personal locator, to provide real-time location data and two-way voice communications for the elderly. The unit is small enough to be worn as a pendant, and uses the Telit modules to transmit data over GSM and GPRS.
The GE865 is the same technology used in the Recominte luggage tracking system, previously covered in RIoT. The quad-band GE865 covers 4 GSM bands for global compatibility, with support for GNSS satellite positioning. The Lola will be able to use Telit’s cloud-based m2mLocate service, which calculates the device’s position based on a database of over 40 million cell-IDs.
Other telephone-based systems are already frequently used in the homes of the elderly, but those systems are only of use within range of the base station that communicates with the pendant. The S911 Lola hopes to aid emergency workers responding to elderly patients who have left the home, usually as a result of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia ‘ increasingly prevalent conditions amongst ageing populations.
Emergency response services will be able to use the system to find and aid elderly users, which Telit claims allows the elderly to live at home longer, reducing the amount of elderly people who are sent to care homes unnecessarily when they could be safely monitored at home instead.
A device like this will aid what Laipac calls the ‘sandwich generation,’ who are looking after both children and elderly relatives. It says its Lola device is an opportunity to facilitate elderly autonomy by applying M2M technology to create an easy-to-use device for emergency use when it detects an unexpected movement, such as a fall. There is also a panic button that can be manually activated.
The S911 Lola communicates using GSM and GPRS, and can be configured to provide alerts if the pendant exits a predetermined GeoFence area. This functionality can be used by relatives wanting to check in on a relative, perhaps wanting to know if they returned from an excursion safely. The in and out GeoFence alerts will indicate whether the pendant has returned, without the need for frequent phone calls.
The Lola uses a sleep mode to provide up to 5 days of battery life, which could be problematic for elderly relatives who might forget to charge it, or wear it again after charging it. Other pendant systems have far longer battery lives, at the expense of a reduced feature set.
Laipac says that its system can be used for other environments, such as monitoring students and staff on campus, a security system for real estate agents, and a safety precaution for lone workers. It charges $20 per month for the tracking system, which lets users monitor location through the Laipac LocationNow website. Laipac also provides products for fleet and asset management, covert vehicle tracking and a bullet proof vest with integrated GPS tracking and shot-detection.
While we usually don’t report on products that are currently undergoing crowdfunding, the ALYT (Affordably Link Your Things) hub has caught our attention thanks to its potential in the smart home. Currently being pushed to developers and early adopters, the box came to light in a press release that announced it would integrate the Serwantess voice control technology, to be used for care home and elderly accommodation.
Serwantess is a system produced by E-Glas and Servus, who hope that the software will prove useful to retirement homes and assisted living facilities that want to let residents remain as independent as possible. A voice controlled room or suite would let residents operate without having to call on staff to assist them in basic tasks that could be achieved by talking to a hub ‘ freeing up staff to focus on more pressing work.
The Serwantess system has been used in the past for those living with disabilities, who often experience the same limited mobility that the elderly suffer. Being able to control a room without having to move around it can greatly alleviate the stress of living with a medical condition.
As such, Serwantess can improve independence and quality of life among those who find it difficult to get up to turn on a light or adjust the thermostat. The Serwantess hardware will be able to communicate with the hub, and the software will enable the user to speak commands aloud. With a little configuring, smart home technology that is often marketed at affluent adults could be used instead to look after our increasing population of elderly people.
The ALYT hub runs the Android OS on a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7, clocked at 1.2GHz. It has a very wide range of connectivity options, which are very exciting when the open-source nature of the platform is considered. The hub supports a wide range of cellular modes (3G, UMTS, WCDMA, HSDPA, HSUPA, GPRS, EDGE), WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, 3 and 4 LE, Z-Wave, ZigBee, the 868MHz Security Wireless Protocol, Infrared, mUSB and NFC. Just about every IoT device would be able to communicate with it, thanks to the extensive protocol support.
The hub was initially designed as a security system, with the added benefit of smart home automation. ALYT aims to build a store that will let developers create apps to support new products. This means that someone with an ALYT hub would be able to add any new IoT device to their home ecosystem by purchasing the corresponding app from the web store. The open source architecture should ensure device compatibility ‘ but the biggest success is found in the expansive range of communications protocols supported by the hub, which is more important than the software in terms of adding new devices.
After all, there is no hope of adding a new ZigBee washing machine to your smart home environment if your central hub lacks a ZigBee radio. This is the main and most important advantage of the ALYT hub, and the main reason we think it could succeed in the smart home ‘ especially if the company is acquired by a bigger player.
There are other hubs out there that offer similar functionality. The Revolv hub has the same level of connectivity but is more expensive, while the Staples Connect is an imperfect product that might be cheaper but requires a number of bridging devices due to the closed ecosystems. This is why the ALYT is noteworthy, because the open source element promises compatibility with just about anything ‘ with a little hard work from an entrepreneurial developer or company enabled by the ALYT app store. With a bit of good fortune ALYT will make its Indiegogo target and start shipping the units ‘ or attract the attention of a potential buyer.