Independent living for all
Ambient Assisted Living
What is Ambient Assisted Living?
Fundamentally, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) ensures the best possible quality of life for older people without it feeling intrusive. AAL focuses on putting the needs of the users first by integrating smart technology into their living environment to support them in their day-to-day lives to enable them to continue to live as independently as possible. AAL can also offer a level of unintrusive monitoring for a family member or caregiver. We’re not talking about 24/7 video cameras but through the use of soft monitoring, any issues can be picked up immediately.
When it comes to an Ambient Assisted Living system, it’s important that you go with one that is as flexible as possible. We’re very proud that we’re able to create bespoke systems that are specifically tailored to the needs of the occupant. Every system that we create is fundamentally versatile which puts us in the perfect position to create truly impactful Ambient Assisted Living systems.
Our systems can improve everyday life simply by automatically taking care of manual tasks such as turning on the lights, adjusting the blinds and activating the burglar alarm. This reduces the day-to-day effort required for someone to continue to live independently without physical assistance. However, further than this, our systems can also provide an added level of safety by providing instant notifications to family members or caregivers in the event of an emergency – such as a fall. Even if this feature is never used (and we hope it isn’t) it provides both the family and the person in question with great peace of mind knowing that the AAL system is there to help.
Fall Detection
Our systems can detect if there’s been no activity in a certain room for a period of time. If this happens then a family member or caregiver can be sent a notification.
Reminders
To ensure that no crucial medications are ever missed, we can have an announcement read out over the speakers in the home at set times throughout the day.
Emergency Call Buttons
We can set up dedicated buttons which can be pressed in the event of an emergency – these can be installed on the walls, placed on tables or we even have wrist-worn buttons.
Electrical Device Monitoring
Potentially dangerous electrical devices such as ovens, irons, and straighteners can be monitored and even automatically turned off after a set period of time, to avoid any accidents.
Automatic Lighting
Ensuring that lighting is automated, reduces the need to walk over to a switch. This makes life much easier when you can’t move as freely as you used to. Plus lights can be used as alerts for those who are hard of hearing – e.g lights can flash when someone is at the door.
Lockout Protection
Our systems allow entry to the home with a code, which reduces the chances of getting locked out. Plus, if the code is forgotten, a family member/caregiver could even open the door remotely if needed.
Help for Emergency Services
If emergency services need to be called, it’s important they access the home as quickly as possible. To help with this, the lights can flash and the front door can be automatically unlocked when certain alarms are triggered.
Family Alarm Alerts
Naturally, AAL systems work perfectly in care homes. However, here the benefits also extend to the members of staff. As our systems are automatically taking care of a wide range of things such as raising the blinds, switching the lights on, ensuring that the heating is at the perfect temperature, etc. a little bit of the pressure can be taken off of the caregivers. When spread across multiple rooms/homes, these time-savings can be significant and allow carers to focus on more important things.
Plus, as falls and alarms will automatically be flagged to them, they can have the added peace of mind that if they’ve not heard anything everything is most likely okay. We can even monitor carer response time, if needed. For example, we could install pressure pads in the beds and monitor external door handles to measure how long between a resident getting up unexpectedly and a career arriving. Having this information can help improve the overall care response and is great to have to reassure family members.
Supporting people with disabilities
Often AAL is talked about in the context of the elderly. However, the systems that we create can also offer a high level of independence to those with disabilities. At the most fundamental level, we can give you control of your whole home via an app – great for anyone with any issues with mobility. Even better than that, most of the time things just happen automatically – so heading over the light switch or having to manually adjust the blinds becomes redundant.
