I have seen Acoustic Monitoring in action and I am very impressed with it. This is exactly the sort of technical innovation that we need to start seeing in care homes because it is my belief, that it improves the quality of life and independence of the resident, and also enables care providers to use their staff in the most efficient and effective way.

Unnecessary night checks mean that residents are often tired the next day, cannot fully participate in activities, are at risk of more falls and nap during the day. Similarly, it puts increasing pressure on our hard-working support staff to physically monitor all residents when many may not need it. Already we are seeing vast improvements in residents being more alert and benefiting from an undisturbed night’s sleep. We are able to deploy the night staff to residents who really need assistance more effectively now instead of checking on people who do not need it.

Introducing acoustic monitoring has significantly improved the quality of care we can provide during the night while significantly reducing the overall cost

It wasn’t until I started as an (AM2) operator that I realized what I had missed when making rounds. We now know much better what’s going on than before when we were making rounds.

The new system really works. One of our service users who is at risk of falling was heard getting up on the system and we were able to get to her before she managed to get out of bed and potentially hurt herself.

Being able to set the sound system to detect the slightest sound – i.e. the onset of a seizure activity has proved very effective.

My thoughts on the Acoustic System were that it seemed to work very well. If it were to be in each of the residents rooms I think it would be very beneficial to the home. It would save having to go into the residents rooms to ring their bells on checks and disturbing them.

I feel that the monitoring system is very helpful. During our night shift we can monitor our residents without going into their room. It also helps us and residents as we go into their rooms for checking which may disturb the residents.

I found the monitoring system to be very affective because we are able to monitor residents without disturbing them. And also if there were any questions over a fall this would be able to be used as evidence for safe guarding and also to reduce falls.

I found this equipment to be beneficial because it saved us going into and waking residents unnecessarily. It has helped reduce our fall risks, it was reassuring to staff to have extra safety equipment in place.