COVER STORY Trigger Warning
Richard Gibson, Technical Director of Pinpoint Ltd, discusses the key considerations to make when selecting a personal attack alarm system for your care facility.
Care facilities are, by definition, places where people are looked aſter, cared for. Unfortunately, they can also occasionally be stressful environments for both staff and patients. Early intervention by trained employees can be vital to avoid the escalation of confrontational situations between patients or staff and patients. Should the situation escalate to an attack, getting help immediately is even more important. This is why many care homes rely on personal attack alarm systems.
REQUIREMENT
Fairly early in my career with Pinpoint, a colleague and I were on-site at a secure, mental health facility installing and commissioning a new piece of equipment on their alarm system. We were instructed to notify the response team before activating any tests. On a couple of occasions, we accidentally set off an ‘emergency’ alarm call, without giving this prior warning.
I still vividly remember how, on each occasion, within seconds of triggering the alarm, the thunder of feet heralded the arrival of the responding staff, running for all they were worth to the location of the supposed attack. They took each alarm extremely seriously!
I tell you this because it really highlights the attack alarm system’s requirement. The system must ‘detect’ the call for help and alert the responders in milliseconds. Every time. The system must also tell the responders exactly which room the problem is in. Every time.
I invite you to think of that scenario when specifying and procuring a personal attack alarm system.
HIGH-PERFORMANCE TECHNOLOGIES
How does a staff personal attack alarm system know exactly where the attack is taking place? It’s possibly something you’ve never thought about.
As you might expect, there are different technologies available for achieving this, and they all have different advantages and disadvantages. So, I will try to explain what, in my experience, are the pros and cons to be aware of when specifying a system.
The laws of physics give us just three possibilities for ‘wire- free’ communication. Light, sound and radio. Within these classifications, there are myriad technologies - but only two that are currently widely used for personal attack alarm systems: Infrared and ‘triangulated’ radio.
RADIO
One of the great advantages of radio is that it can go through buildings quite well – so for a communication device that’s
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great. But when it comes to being able to tell the location of the device, it’s a real problem!
Of course, there is a technological solution – it’s called ‘triangulation’. As the name might suggest, the signal from a transmitter needs to be received by three receivers. The time the signal takes to reach each receiver is proportional to the distance. So, by calculating the difference in time that each of the three receivers received the signal, the location of the transmitter can be calculated.
“The system must ‘detect’
the call for help and alert the responders in milliseconds every time.”
This works relatively well in two dimensions i.e. in a building with a single floor. However, most buildings are two floors or more - so the signal also needs to be detected by additional receivers on the adjacent floor(s) so the system can calculate which floor the transmitter is on. This requires greater processing capability and adds to the complexity of the system.
The situation is made worse by modern building materials, particularly metal foil-backed insulation and plaster boards. The metal causes signals to be reflected. When a radio signal is reflected, the ‘path length’ can be much longer than the physical distance from transmitter to receiver – giving the possibility of a false location being calculated. Additional receivers can be used to reduce this risk, but this again adds to the complexity (and cost) of the system.
INFRARED Infrared enables a much simpler system to be used.
Solid surfaces such as walls, ceilings, floors and doors block infrared light, so in effect each room becomes a ‘sealed box’. When a receiver in a room is triggered by an infrared alarm signal, providing the location of that receiver is known, the location of the incident is also known. Nothing needs to be calculated.
The optical system is what makes or breaks an infrared system in critical applications. At Pinpoint, a great deal of attention is focused on the infrared communication – optimising both ends of the process, signal transmission and reception – so that when a transmitter is activated in a room (even under beds or furniture) the signal should always trigger the receiver.
www.tomorrowscare.co.uk
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