Smart technology for an easier everyday life

When Anders Weltzin Opdahl started as an advisor on assistive technology for the municipality of Ålesund in 2018, they were in an exciting phase of a comprehensive regional project. Ålesund and 24 neighboring municipalities had just made a major procurement of assistive technology. Anders, with his technical background and passion for numbers, was eager to see how these solutions could simplify their daily work.

On a daily basis, Anders works at the Technical Assistive Technology Service, which is responsible for the municipality’s assistive technology inventory and welfare technology. Among other things, this is where the personal safety alarms installed by the home care service are programmed. It was precisely during this work that he began to notice challenges related to older alarms.

“ The problems arose because we received technical alerts about expired personal safety alarms, but we had no way of tracking which user had previously owned them,” Anders explains.

Attempts to manually record serial numbers and user initials quickly proved to be time-consuming. With a high volume of safety alarms, it was difficult to keep track, and human errors caused alerts to remain stuck in the system.

The solution came to them by chance when they heard about Legrand Cares’ solution for managing digital safety alarms, the Care Management Portal (CMP) with a BI dashboard. With this solution, they could look up the serial number of the sensors connected to a safety alarm and quickly determine who it belonged to.

The municipality now has a better overview of technical alerts and battery failures. In addition, they can easily see which base station the alarms are connected to, which helps them identify misplaced devices and contact users when necessary.

Even though the location data isn’t precise, it provides enough information to take action. “It’s a big improvement,” says Anders.

Simplified Daily Work and Better Resource Utilization

The BI dashboard has had a major impact on the daily work of Anders and his colleagues.

“ It has given us a better overview and significantly reduced our working hours,” he says . “ Without this overview, we might have risked replacing more equipment than necessary, or had trouble pinpointing faults related to old equipment.”

Anders emphasizes that the success of introducing assistive technology largely comes down to scoping and gradual implementation.

“We started with smaller purchases, such as personal safety alarms with active and passive alerts, and ran these as separate projects. This made it easier to gain experience, share information, and build expertise step by step,” he says.

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