Either when first creating a resident account or after selecting that account in the Residents panel, Home Managers and Administrators will have the option to update the Resident's settings for how the Ally Scheduler schedules safety visits or creates activity alerts.
To find out more about a setting open the collapsible section.
Enable Activity Monitoring
The first step is to decide whether to "Enable Monitoring".
The first step is to decide whether to "Enable Monitoring".
Monitoring with Ally is done via an acoustic and motion monitor, installed in the Resident's room. It is activated by your staff through the app. Only select "Enable Monitoring" if you intend to use Monitoring for the resident and have consent forms or best interest rules in place allowing the resident to be monitored with Ally. You will need to tick the box to confirm this.
Note : If you DO NOT Enable Monitoring, the Trigger Mode Settings, which are used to determine activity monitoring, will not be available. The next setting listed will be Intelligent Round Settings.
Trigger Modes
The Trigger Mode Settings allows you to personalise what type, and how much activity triggers an activity alert for the resident. There are 4 Trigger Modes. (When utilising Motion activity, ensure the activity monitor is positioned in the most effective position. Please refer to The How to Install Ally Monitoring Devices article for detailed information).
Sound or Motion
Sound or Motion
Alerts will be triggered when either sound or motion exceeds its individual threshold.
There are 3 parameters to review for Sound or Motion:
Sound Threshold - is the cumulative number of minutes of sound detected by the monitor before sending an alert.
Motion Threshold - is the number of seconds of motion detected in the field of view of the motion sensor, before sending an alert. This can be set from any motion to 60 seconds. This allows you to be alerted faster, if required, to motion events. Motion alerts will only include a sound recording to review if sounds occurred during the motion event. If using this setting, it is extremely important to:
Make sure the number of seconds of motion before alerting staff actually suits the resident's needs. You may not want staff rushing to the room if it takes the resident a minute to mobilise to near the end of the bed.
Settling Period - determines how long after a check, or a dismissal we do not want to be alerted to activity for. This allows the resident to settle back down without repeat disturbance from staff visits. If either the sound or motion threshold is met during this period, Staff will be alerted at the end of the timer - so is still much swifter than a scheduled 2 hourly check for example.
Motion alerts ignore settling period - select this to override the settling period. Remember, the settling period is there to let the resident settle back to sleep, and staff can have an informed response once the settling period ends. Ignoring the settling period is only really appropriate if a resident has a tendency to mobilise very quickly and be prone to incidents directly after a check.
Sound and Motion
Sound and Motion
Alerts will be triggered when the combined amount of sound and motion exceed a single threshold.
Activity Threshold - This is how many minutes of combined sound and/ or motion should take place before sending an alert through to staff. This allows staff to review a full scene of events in the room to more accurately decide if this resident needs assistance or they can leave the resident to continue resting undisturbed.
Minimum Time between rounds - determines how long after a check, or a dismissal we do not want to be alerted to activity for. This allows the resident to settle back down without repeat disturbance from staff visits. If there has been any activity during the activity period, Staff will be alerted at the end of the timer - so is still much swifter than a scheduled 2 hourly check for example.
You should choose the initial setting based on how active or restless you believe the resident is during the night in addition to the current burden of staff members. We recommend keeping this number between 15 and 25 minutes.
Sound Only
Sound Only
Alerts will only be triggered when sound exceeds its threshold. Motion will not trigger alerts.
Sound threshold - is the number of minutes of sound detected before sending an alert.
Settling period - determines how long after a check, or a dismissal we do not want to be alerted to activity for. This allows the resident to settle back down without repeat disturbance from staff visits. If either the sound or motion threshold is met during this period, Staff will be alerted at the end of the timer - so is still much swifter than a scheduled 2 hourly check for example.
This setting is likely appropriate for:
Independently mobile residents, where you don’t need to know when they are mobile, but want to listen to any events in case they at any point require assistance/ call out for help
Motion Only
Motion Only
Alerts will only be triggered when motion exceeds its own threshold. Sound will not trigger alerts.
Motion threshold - is the number of seconds of motion detected in the field of view of the motion sensor, before sending an alert. This can be set from any motion to 60 seconds. This allows you to be alerted faster, if required, to motion events. Motion alerts will only include a sound recording to review if sounds occurred during the motion event. If using this setting, it is extremely important to:
Make sure the number of seconds of motion before alerting staff actually suits the resident's needs. You may not want staff rushing to the room if it takes the resident a minute to mobilise to near the end of the bed.
Settling period and if we want motion alerts to ignore the settling period all of which we saw in an earlier setting.
The night team should be adopting a sleep positive environment at night wherever possible by closing doors, turning off TV's when residents are resting and so on. This setting is likely appropriate when that is not possible such as:
A resident likes to sleep with their TV or radio causing a large volume of unhelpful alerts
A resident calls out/ talks all night as part of their current condition but doesn’t require assistance
The residents room is directly next to consistent external noise that cannot be reduced from the hallway or neighbouring room and they don't want the door closed
Intelligent Round Settings
This determines the regular interval for a safety check, referred to as "Rounds" in the app. These rounds will be scheduled for residents based on the last time a visit was recorded in app. So if the rounds are set to every 2 hours and the last check recorded in Ally was 1 hour ago, the next round will be in another hour. Rounds are rounded up and down by 15 minutes so they can be grouped together to reduce notifications for staff.
This determines the regular interval for a safety check, referred to as "Rounds" in the app. These rounds will be scheduled for residents based on the last time a visit was recorded in app. So if the rounds are set to every 2 hours and the last check recorded in Ally was 1 hour ago, the next round will be in another hour. Rounds are rounded up and down by 15 minutes so they can be grouped together to reduce notifications for staff.
We recommend: If you choose to program in your safety checks for monitored residents into our system for efficiency, then we recommend also adding residents who are NOT monitored into the app so as staff are reminded to check on them just like all the other residents. This avoids them running two operational systems, which can be cumbersome and confusing.
Time between rounds if monitor is online & activated:
This is the longest amount of time between when one physical check ends and another is required. These scheduled Rounds must be responded to with a physical check to keep residents safe.
This setting is an extra safety measure to ensure residents are still physically checked on occasion even while the monitoring is enabled.
To determine if it is safe to extend the frequency of check, and improve your residents sleep quality, check the timeline in the Morning Handover. This will show you how active a resident is and if unnecessary checks can be reduced.
Time between rounds if monitor is offline or deactivated:
In the event that monitoring is disabled, a room's monitor is offline (power or network failure for example), or monitoring has not been started for the evening, the app will alert staff to physically check on residents at this frequency.
This is an extra safety measure to ensure residents are still physically checked on at safe intervals if monitoring is not enabled for some reason. This is the same setting as rounds when monitoring is disabled in a resident's settings.
Set this setting to what you would have chosen as safety checks without Ally's monitoring.
Automation
The following settings determine the automation of starting and stopping the rounds and safety checks in line with the night shift.
The following settings determine the automation of starting and stopping the rounds and safety checks in line with the night shift.
Automatically Start Rounds :
Scheduling of the safety checks will start automatically at the beginning of the night shift. This can be changed in the Home settings page.
Example : If the resident is on a 3 hourly safety check cycle, and the night shift starts at 8pm, then the first safety will be at 11pm.
Automatically shuttoff rounds & monitoring:
This determines if the safety checks and monitoring automatically stops at the end of the night shift when this setting is selected. This can be changed in the Home settings page.
Override auto shutoff
This setting allows the residents monitoring to continue after the end of your night shift, and will therefore need to be manually deactivated. This is automatically off when creating a resident.
Consent
By selecting the consent box, you are confirming that you are authorised to change the residents settings.