Who it is for
Senior living, group homes, HOAs, guarded communities, dorms, business centers, self-storage. Anywhere there are units to monitor and staff on site.
For communities with staff on site
The fastest responder is already on the property.
Central station monitoring is good backup, but the help it calls for has to travel to you. Your own staff are already there, and they know the resident, not just the zone number. They know whether this has happened before, and they can clear a false alarm before it costs you a fine.
Alarm Station alerts on-site staff as soon as the system trips, not when the central station works down its call list. Alert them first. Escalate to central second.
The demo
See Alarm Station in action.
Cedar Grove, an eight-apartment care community, on a wall-mounted touchscreen branded by the alarm company that installed it. A fall in 204, a resident who pressed his mobile pendant while out getting groceries, three alarms arriving at once, and a good deal more.
A community this size would not see anything like this much in a few minutes. The demo compresses a great deal of activity into a short run so you can watch how the screen behaves when things arrive together.
Alarm Station
A monitoring station in your staff area that a night shift can use without training.
Each residence, suite, or unit has its own alarm system. Alarm Station puts those alarms on a screen at the nurse desk, the office, or the guard post, in language staff can read in the moment, with instructions on what to do written in plain English.
What it is
A touchscreen that turns your staff area into a monitoring station. A tablet on a stand, or a smart screen on the wall. Alarms appear as they happen, with clear instructions what to do.
How it solves this
Staff see the alarm first and can address the problem immediately, not after an off-site operator has worked its way down a call list. You can keep your central station as backup for when staff cannot respond.
Each unit keeps its own alarm system
Alarms arrive immediately
Two buttons: I’m on it, Resolved
Works alongside monitoring
At 2:14am, the people already on site should be the first to know, not the last.
The signal already exists. It is already traveling.
The gap
The people who can respond first are often the last to know.
An alarm travels at network speed. The minutes come from the human steps in the middle: a central station operator has to become available, and then somebody on site has to answer the phone.
The people who can respond first are already on site
A fall detector fires at 2:14am. The signal goes out to a monitoring center, waits its turn for an operator, and comes back as a phone call whenever that station’s protocol reaches your staff. The care assistant forty feet away is first in the response and last in the sequence.
What staff are given is late, and often unreadable
What arrives is an account number and a zone, or a keypad code on a wall. Nobody off site knows that 214 sets this off every week, or that the resident in 118 walks at night. The context that decides whether this is an emergency is already on site, and none of it is in the signal.
A dispatch that a walk around the corner would have prevented
A resident knocks their own pendant off the nightstand. A storage unit is opened by the person who rents it. Police and EMTs roll because the question never reached anybody on site, and the community pays twice: once in false alarm fines, and again in responders who stop treating the address as urgent.
Why it works
There is nothing to learn.
A care assistant who started last week will not learn software at 3am. If the screen is complicated, they walk past it. If it is two buttons and one sentence, they use it.
One decision, then the next one
I’m on it. Resolved. There is no menu, nothing to log into, and nothing to remember. If something needs a person, the next step is obvious at a glance.
Words staff already have
Medical alert from the app. Go to the person. Not a zone number, and not a code that means somebody disarmed their system. What happened, where, and what to do about it.
No training to survive a Saturday shift
Nobody on your night shift asked for a new system, and none of them will read a manual. This is built so that the first person who walks up to it uses it correctly, without ever having been shown.
The touchscreen
One screen. The whole site.
An Android touchscreen at the nurse desk, the office, or the guard post. A tablet on a stand, or a smart screen on the wall. Always on, and never waiting to be opened. Staff press I’m on it, then Resolved.
Alarms never compete with noise
An open alarm holds the top of the screen until somebody takes it. A low battery or a power failure waits on a list of its own. Nobody scrolls past a beeping battery to find a medical alarm.
Plain language, and what to do
Burglary alarm, Unit 214, Front Door. Underneath it, the short instruction you wrote for that kind of alarm, so nobody has to decide what to do in the moment.
Two buttons
I’m on it. Resolved. There is nothing else to operate, and nothing else to get wrong at 3am.
It looks after itself
If anything goes wrong, the touchscreen tells you on its own display. It puts itself right as soon as it can. Nobody has to check on it, and nobody has to restart it.
How it works
Nothing to install on the systems you already have.
01
The system sends a signal, as it always has
Either straight to Alarm Station, or through a platform like Alarm.com. The alarm systems in your units carry on doing exactly what they do today.
02
It appears on the touchscreen, not in a phone call
With your own instructions for that kind of alarm sitting underneath it.
03
Staff press I’m on it, then Resolved
Staff are the first line, and what you keep behind them is your decision. For sites that want one, there is a record of who took each alarm and when.
Alarm.com
If it is on Alarm.com, your staff can see it.
A standard alarm account tells staff that something happened. An Alarm.com account can do a great deal more, and Alarm Station puts nearly all of it on the screen in the staff area.
Talk to the room
Two-way voice opens on an alarm, through the alarm system or an IndiGo pendant. Listen-only on duress and panic, so nothing gives away that somebody is listening.
See what happened
Video verification and remote video monitoring, with the clip that caused the alarm and a live view of the same camera.
Know before it is an alarm
Wellness activity, a missed check-in, a morning somebody did not get up. Fall detection and the Safety Button arrive as themselves.
Break-ins and emergencies
Crash and smash, where the system was destroyed before it could report. Gunshot detection. Panic raised from a phone.
More about the Alarm.com integration →
Alarm Station is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by Alarm.com, and Alarm.com is their trademark.
Who it is for
Communities of units, each with its own alarm system.
Care & group homes
Senior living, assisted living, group homes. The answer is always the person on shift.
Communities & HOAs
Homeowners associations, dorms, and other living communities with many units.
Schools & campuses
Schools, campuses, and dorms. Facilities staff, many units, one screen.
Business centers
Business complexes, offices, and warehousing with staff on site.
For dealers
Recurring revenue on accounts you already have.
No new system. Alarm Station attaches to the accounts you already monitor, and it is your name on the screen when staff look up at 3am.
- Your logo, your number, on the touchscreen.
- A product the dealer down the road cannot quote.
- A way into care, without a commodity offer.
Questions we get first
We already have monitoring.
Then you have a choice. Keeping it is the straightforward path: staff become the first line, and the central station sits behind them for the hours nobody is on shift. If you have staff around the clock and want to take the whole load, you can do that instead, subject to your insurer and local codes. You can also run both at once.
Will this reduce our false alarm fines?
That is the strongest financial argument for it. Staff can walk to the unit, find the resident who set it off, and close it out before it becomes a dispatch. We do not promise a number. Your own record will produce one.
Our staff will not use it.
There is nothing to use. It is a touchscreen in the staff area showing what is happening, and when something needs a person the next step is on the screen in front of them.
What if the internet goes down?
Use a device with a mobile connection as well as Wi-Fi, and the screen keeps working when the building internet does not. If it still cannot reach us it says so across the whole screen, and picks up again on its own once the connection is back. The alarm systems in your units are unaffected either way, and keep doing exactly what they do now.
Is this a nurse call system, or a medical device?
Neither, and medical alert monitoring is still one of the main things it is used for. Pendant presses, fall detection and missed check-ins arrive on the touchscreen like any other alarm, with the instruction your staff wrote underneath, and staff answer them the same way. What Alarm Station is not is the call bell infrastructure itself: the cords, the room stations, and the listed equipment a licensed community is required to have. Keep that, and let this be the screen your staff actually watch. It makes no clinical determination and it is not a regulated medical device.
How do we get it?
Talk to us, or ask the alarm company that already looks after your community. We receive SIA DC-09 from the systems you already have, and we integrate most closely with Alarm.com. Start here.
Talk to us.
If you sell alarm systems, or you run a staffed community and wish the alarms showed up at the desk, we would like to hear from you.