Moving From Analog to IP-Based Social Care Alarms

2​5 January 2024

Today, the social care alarm industry is undergoing the same transition to VoIP and IP communications as the traditional telephony systems for enterprise communication did 20 years ago. A driving force for the transition is the switch-off of the PSTN and 2G/3G mobile networks.

When the initial VoIP transition happened, it was a new technology, and all standards were not fully developed. The industry was learning as it was deploying the services. To enable the social care alarm transition to make use of the past learnings, I am sharing my experiences of some of the key challenges associated with the move in this blog.

The social care industry is still in an early stage of transition and unfortunately many mistakes seen in the past are repeated. The good news now, however, is that there are standards in place and continuously evolving to tackle the issues.

IP-based technology is fundamentally different from analog

The move calls for the awareness and understanding that alarm communication works fundamentally different in IP-based technology compared to in an analog-based technology. Knowing these differences makes it easier to build modern social care alarm solutions and embrace the digital shift.

The areas I want to address are:

• Different social care alarm use cases call for different digital protocols
• Transmission of alarm event
• Transmission of voice communication
• DNS, NAT and IP addresses in robust and reliable services
• Design for security

To read the full article, please follow the link below;

Moving from analog to IP-based social care alarms (iotcomms.io)