Day: April 27, 2021

Based in the coastal town of Ierapetra in Crete, the Robinson Club is designed around ‘neighbourhoods’ of hotel rooms across a 150 acre-site. This unique layout meant that the fire system specified needed to deliver seamless detection and notification of a potential fire to the hotel’s staff and guests, who could be located anywhere across the 340 rooms and suites, multiple restaurants, spa facilities and conference rooms. Responsible for the design, supply and installation of the fire detection, extinguishing system and firefighting equipment at the 5-star Robinson Club Ierapetra were Advanced partners, Zarifopoulos. In total, Zarifopoulos installed 14 of Advanced’s industry-leading Axis EN fire alarm control panels on a high-speed, fault-tolerant network alongside over 900 notification and detection devices including detectors, call points and sounders. Spilios Alexopoulos, Commercial Director at Zarifopoulos, referring to the state of the art system as well as the special attention that has been paid to the fire protection of the luxurious Robinson Club Ierapetra, commented, “Its widespread nature required a high-speed network of fire alarm control panels to ensure instant notification of a fire event. As a long-term partner of Advanced, we knew the company’s solutions offered the high levels of performance and reliability required, combined with ease of use and installation.” Axis EN is EN54 parts 2, 4 and 13 approved and its panels can be used in single-loop, single-panel format or easily configured into high-speed, multi-loop panels in 200 node networks covering huge areas. Advanced products’ ease of installation and configuration as well as the range of peripherals available make it customisable to almost any application. Vladimir Zrnic, Regional Sales Manager for Southern Europe, said, “In large-scale sites such as the Robinson Club, Ierapetra, it’s vital to ensure that the panels, when networked, will sustain adequate performance levels. As the number of panels and peripherals on a network increase, some systems can slow down dramatically, compromising safety and reliability. “Advanced’s fire panel networks are widely regarded as some of the most robust and resilient in fire situations. Axis EN panels can be configured into networks of up to 200 panels in standard or fault-tolerant configurations, while sophisticated cause and effect and intuitive, easy programming of rules make implementation effortless.” The Robinson Club Ierapetra resort opened in the summer of 2020 and is one of its German owner, TUI Group’s, largest investments in Greece. Designed with preservation of the natural environment in mind, the hotel offers a minimalist, high-end experience for its guests. Advanced, owned by FTSE 100 company Halma PLC, protects a wide range of prestigious and high-profile sites across Southern Europe – from Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia and the Romanian National Library to Serbia’s University of Belgrade. Halma is a global group of life-saving technology companies with a clear purpose to grow a safer, cleaner, healthier future for everyone, every day.  

Challenge Healthcare officials and organizations are facing the challenge of contact tracing quickly and effectively to curb the spread. Time is of the essence when it comes to backtracking an infected person and identifying potential people who were exposed to the infected person or contaminated areas, but there are currently gaps in information. Solution Motorola Solutions is committed to innovating mission-critical technologies to protect people and communities, including looking at the existing technology they have in the market that can help alleviate current healthcare challenges.   Motorola Solutions’ Avigilon™ Access Control Manager (ACM) is a physical access control system that is designed to help organizations protect its people, property and assets. The ACM™ system seamlessly integrates with Avigilon Control Center (ACC) video management software to provide a fully unified security solution that helps organizations proactively monitor and secure their sites. Key features of a unified ACM and ACC™ system can provide important insights to help support contact tracing efforts such as determining potentially exposed people and areas so organizations can intervene faster. For example, consider a scenario where an infected employee that worked at a distribution center has been identified. The infected employee has since been staying at home to recover. As a safety check, the security team at the distribution center can use their unified ACM and ACC system to trace the employee’s steps. It can be presumed that the doors the employee used may be contaminated, particularly door handle surfaces. The identity correlation report in the ACM system provides operators an efficient way to generate a report of any doors accessed by the employee during their working hours. The report provides the date and time of when a door was accessed by the employee, the time difference between door access events and who else accessed the door. Subsequently, operators can identify other employees that have accessed the same doors in the same timeframe as the infected employee. The report also tracks valid card reads and invalid card reads by including a list of employees that have attempted to access a door. Even if some employees did not access a door successfully, there is still an exposure risk because the door can potentially be contaminated due to contact by the infected employee. With the Identity Search feature in ACC software, security operators can easily search in the system and see when and where the infected employee has accessed a door at the distribution center with their access card. Operators can view all of the doors that the employee attempted to access when they were still working and extend contact tracing efforts further by launching Avigilon Appearance Search™ technology from the Identity Search results. Powered by AI, Avigilon Appearance Search technology allows operators to quickly search for the employee from the Identity Search results and track their route throughout the distribution center for other potentially contaminated areas. This can help reduce hours of video footage review to minutes – expediting contact tracing efforts. When combined with fixed video security cameras installed inside and outside the distribution center, operators can achieve optimal situational awareness across the entire site and create a powerful case detailing the chain-of-events associated with the infected employee’s whereabouts. The security team is in a position to obtain robust information to help determine which other employees have also accessed the same doors or areas during the same time frame as the infected employee – which can help in determining the number of potentially exposed people. The distribution center can then proactively advise the potentially exposed employees of the risks and take necessary hygiene and safety measures such as having the exposed employees tested and increasing sanitation of potentially contaminated areas. With a unified video security and access control solution in place, organizations can leverage its existing technology in an innovative way for obtaining critical information to better protect its employees and people in the community. Motorola Solutions proudly manufactures and deploys the sophisticated, cutting-edge communications, software, video security and analytics technologies that keep communities and nations safe. They have been on the front lines with federal, state and local governments, including in times of crisis, for over 90 years. Today, their 17,000 innovators, engineers and manufacturing specialists are eager to help address critical gaps in the availability of medical and health management technology needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.