Umps Link

Australia faces an unprecedented aged care shortage, with over a million people relying on government-supported care, a number projected to triple in 30 years. Aged care providers, families, and older individuals seek technology to transition care to homes and augment care workforces. Current solutions can perpetuate stigma and neglect users' holistic needs. The design brief aimed to create a safe, accessible, and desirable end-to-end platform for health applications, serving as an interface between users and clinicians, managing emergency responses and chronic disease care, and promoting comfortable user engagement from home.

The Umps Link is a world-first IoT platform, developed to enable safety-critical health applications at home. The Umps Link is the only smart-home platform to be designed to and independently certified against AS4607:1999, the Australian standard for personal emergency response systems. Using a reference group of users and employing universal design principles, it ensures accessibility for diverse physical and cognitive abilities, using light, colour, sound, and contrasting textures. Remote configuration and troubleshooting cater to those with low-technology literacy. Umps Link combines safety and accessibility with a modern design, reflecting the latest smart-home technologies, making it desirable for users.

The Umps Link's overall impact is transformative, empowering older people to live independently at home through user-friendly applications and seamless care delivery. By addressing unique needs with an elegant, adaptable design, Umps Link sets a new standard in technology for the aged care industry. Umps Link exemplifies good product design and serves as an inspiration for future innovations in the industry, ultimately contributing to a safer and more prosperous future for older and vulnerable individuals.

Market-leading personal alarm. Combined with the Umps Link Pendant, the Umps Link enables a market-leading personal alarm. This wearable can be used to trigger an emergency alert to a 24 x 7 response centre from anywhere in their home. A trained operator will then dial back through the Umps Link within 60 seconds and provide any support required, including calling emergency services. Integration with any sensor or medical device, with Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa and WiFi capabilities integrated into the Umps Link Hub. This enables the Umps Link Hub to connect to devices like a personal alarm, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter or heart rate monitor and share vital information with clinicians in real time. Automated smoke alarm detection. On average, more than one person dies in a house fire in Australia every week. Older people and people with disabilities are overrepresented in this statistic. The Umps Link Hub automatically detects a smoke alarm activation through sound and notifies an off-site emergency response centre. Safety-critical voice and data connectivity through multiple long-range communications technologies, and operates over 3G, 4G (LTE), Ethernet and WiFi. In the event one of these communications pathways fails, the device will automatically failover to a backup.