Smart SIP Technology at the Heart of Lifesaving Global Growth

This article was originally published in UC Today June 26, 2023

Leading real-time communications platform provider iotcomms.io on its innovative, cloud-powered collaboration with care sector wearables disruptor Navigil

When you are in the business of caring, communication really counts.

Indeed, there are moments when it can be a matter of life and death.

Powerful, cloud-based IP telephony has of course changed the communication paradigm beyond recognition. However, when enterprise combines that smart functionality with clever innovation, that’s when the magic really happens.

In the case of the connected care sector in particular, technology’s new mobile-first, always-on response to the challenge of delivering effective, cost-efficient services is changing lives around the world.

This is no mean feat. An increasingly ageing global population, a shortage of carers and nurses, and financially hard-pressed families struggling to look after old or sick loved ones is a potent combination of factors which add up to a huge societal issue.

Enterprises with game-changing solutions are well-placed to thrive. All they need is the right technology collaborator.

Community caring transformed

“When you look at residential care for the elderly alone, there simply will never be enough resources to take care of everybody – instead, technology can help enable more and more people to stay longer and safer in their own homes,” says Matti Räty, President and CEO of rapidly-expanding wellness wristwatch provider Navigil, whose collaboration with leading real-time communications platform provider iotcomms.io is disrupting this vast market.

A recent study shows that, by 2025, there will be a shortage of 380,000 nurses in Japan and 3.2 million in the US alone. The scale of the global opportunity is therefore significant.

Navigil’s offering is a connected wristwatch containing a SIM card and incorporating a speaker, a microphone, and GPS and wellness tracking functionality.

When the wearer experiences an emergency and needs urgent help, they simply push a button to either speak directly to their designated carer or benefit from an interactive voice response system that avoids the call ending up in someone’s voicemail.

The wearer’s registered care network – whether professionals or family members – are either able to respond to a voice call or receive notifications of the emergency, plus information regarding the wearer’s location and activity levels such as heart and respiration rates.

Clever cloud calling

Crucially, from a care scheduling perspective, the solution can be defined to alert nominated carers at nominated times, enabling a mix of several family members and/or care professionals to share the workload.

Competitors’ products call multiple carers at the same time in order to reach those actually on duty, wasting valuable time and unnecessarily replicating processes.

“No family member can be available 100% of the time,” says Räty. “You may have a dentist or doctor’s appointment or something which takes you out of the loop. In that case, it’s important for the family to be able to manage a rota of care in a reliable manner and for the user interface to be available on their laptops or phones.”

iotcomms.io’s serverless communications platform with SIP and IVR technology is at the centre of Navigil’s efficient system. It handles the watches’ SIP-based voice communication, transcoding of Navigil’s own codec and IVR-based alarm call routing, as well as providing 24/7 global support and limitless global scalability.

Easy global roll-out

“We chose to collaborate with iotcomms.io because their technology is all cloud-based,” says Räty. “We needed the capacity to roll-out into the US, Japan, Australia and Europe easily and cost-effectively. Our previous partner that supported our legacy products was all about locally-based hardware, which didn’t fit with our global ambitions.

“Also, support is critical as we are talking about a life-saving solution. We were able to work closely with iotcomms.io already from the start of the solution’s development and to ensure it was properly tested and reliable, and that we had the best of breed when it came to the architecture itself.

“Their platform has a rich set of features, and we could easily use their APIs to build an IVR-like scheduling function that we provide to the carers in our app.

“They are experts in their field, so it was easy to have the discussion with them. They spoke the right language and understood where we wanted to go.

There is also a real synergy in terms of growth ambitions for both companies too. Collaborating together feels like a win-win for us both.

iotcomms.io co-founder Gunnar Reinholdsen agrees. “We started the journey with Navigil three years ago and, from an initial high-level discussion, broke down their requirements into smaller pieces. Together, we have evolved the solution into what it is today. We share Navigil’s ambitions to scale into numerous global markets and we work with others in the health and care sector too, so for us, it feels like a very good fit indeed.”

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