Who it is for
Senior living, group homes, gated communities and HOAs, apartments, student housing, 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.
Alarm Station is a touchscreen that turns your staff area into a monitoring station. Alarms arrive the moment they’re sent, with your own instructions.
- Medical / Care
- Personal safety
- Intrusion / Burglary
- Cameras / Remote guard
- Fire / Smoke
- Carbon monoxide
- Water leak / Flood
- and more
Your staff knows the resident, not just the zone number. They can be at the door while a central station is still calling, or clear a false alarm before it becomes a fine.
Alert them first. Escalate to central second.
The demos
See Alarm Station in action.
A senior living community
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 gated community
Thornbury Gate, sixteen homes behind one entrance. A break-in, a camera that picks out somebody who should not be there, fire and carbon monoxide, a panic button, and water where there should not be any.
Neither community would see anything like this much in a few minutes. The demos compress a great deal of activity into a short run so you can watch how the screen behaves when things arrive together.
Try it yourself
Run a demo yourself.
Alarm Station is a free install from Google Play. Open it, choose a demo instead of typing a setup code, and you are looking at a working screen with alarms arriving on their own. No account, nothing to arrange.
It runs on any Android device, and a 10-inch tablet or larger shows the full layout.
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 sees 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
A record of who responded
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 gets 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.
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.
An alarm nobody takes does not sit there
Keep a central station behind your staff and anything still waiting after the delay you set forwards to them on its own. Nobody has to remember to escalate it.
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
A system in each unit, one screen for the staff.
01
Each unit has its own alarm system
An apartment, a house, a room: whatever your community counts in. Many already have one, and where they do not, your alarm company puts one in the way it always would.
02
Alarms show up immediately
The alarm appears on the touchscreen in the staff area the moment it is sent, with your own instructions for that kind of alarm.
03
On-site staff handles the alarms
They take it, handle it, and close it out. If nobody takes it, it can escalate to a central station as backup.
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 →
If you are an Alarm.com dealer, start here →
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
The nurse or caregiver at the desk. Senior living, assisted living, group homes.
Gated communities & HOAs
The guard at the gate. Guarded neighborhoods and homeowners associations, separate homes behind one staffed entrance.
Multifamily
The front desk. Apartment complexes, condos and student housing.
Schools & campuses
The facilities office, and the satellite posts. Schools and campuses, many buildings, one screen.
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 looks up at 3am.
- Your logo, your number, on the touchscreen.
- On-site staff handling alarms reduces central station traffic.
Questions we get first
Does this replace the monitoring we already have?
Only if you want it to. Keeping it is the straightforward path: staff becomes 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.
Will our staff know how to use it?
It tells them exactly what to do while they are using it. Each alarm says what happened and where, your own instructions are on the screen with it, and there are two buttons: I’m on it and Resolved.
Who actually uses it?
Whoever is already on shift. In senior living and care that is the nurse or caregiver at the desk. In a gated community it is the guard at the gate. In apartments and condos it is the front desk, on a campus the facilities office, in self-storage the manager, and in a business center the guard desk or the office.
What if the internet goes down?
Use a device with a cellular 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 answers 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.