Senior Living Community to Beta Test Emergency Notification System

Seniorliving communities are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring the safety of their residents, and in some cases technology could be making it easier to warn residents of an impending emergency and verify that they've received the message.


Officials at Christian Living Communities, a Denver-based nonprofit senior living provider, were looking for an emergency notification system that was granular, didn't rely on phone or Internet connections, and provided verifiable two-way communication. Russ DenBraber, CEO of Christian Living Communities, said he was concerned about incidents in which staff want to initiate contact with residents to provide information and alerts for events like natural disasters. He said currently staff at the communities call residents to provide emergency information and also use an intercom system, but calling can be a time-consuming process and intercoms negate the feeling of living at home.


DenBraber said he became aware that Jeff Pepper, president and CEO of Touchtown Inc., was interested in creating a system that allows staff to address individual residents or the entire community, while also requiring the resident to acknowledge that they received the message.


Touchtown is developing Touchtown Safety, a communications system in which each residential unit within a senior living community is issued a console that lets messages be delivered directly to the resident from a central computer. The system will rely on a mesh network that ensures the system remains active if the power, phone lines or Internet go down.


"Unlike a regular wireless network that has transmitters and then devices scattered around that are receivers, each one of these devices is both a transmitter and a receiver," DenBraber said. "Each one of these devices that is then placed in our residents' apartments reach out and look around itself on about a 500-foot radius and establishes communication with adjacent devices. And they kind of go around the building and self-establish this mesh network."


If one unit goes down, the units surrounding it will rebuild their network and notify the system controller that the device is no longer in contact.


DenBraber said Touchtown Safety will be beta tested starting in August at the Holly Creek community, which has about 210 apartment homes of which 85 percent are occupied. It will first be implemented in one wing that consists of about 24 residents. There DenBraber hopes to work out the bugs before doing a full rollout to the entire population.


Staff will use the system to send audible and visible alerts to the entire population or to target a specific area of the building or certain residents. For example, the message targeting could help prevent confusion during an event like a gas leak. DenBraber said once the message is sent to the residents, there's a button on the device that they will push to acknowledge that they received the alert. The central command console then shows in real time when the message was sent to the residents and when they pushed the button to acknowledge it.


The central console will also allow messages to be created quickly. "Part of the reality of emergency communications is that in an emergency, the people that want to do the communicating are sometimes a bit flustered and not always as clear thinking as you would like them to be," DenBraber said. "So the system comes with a series of predesigned templates for emergency messages, and it's just a matter of point and click -- three or four clicks composes a message and sends it to all the residents."


He said an example of a message would be: "A tornado's been sighted at [fill in the blank] intersection, please move to the safety of the garage."