Tracking large numbers of people at once with 5-10 second intervals has been one of our biggest strengths as a business. We allow 1000+ people to be tracked from a single screen (by the way you would not want to do that on one screen if you could avoid it). However when an alarm goes off, or several boundary and panic alarms go off, what is the monitoring person supposed to do? Tracking lots of people always seems simple, until you add in the fact that each person could belong to an alarm group with 10 people, (plus the primary monitor)and those 10 could be set up to receive their alarms through sms and email. Multiply that by 100 individuals and you can have hell on earth in the control room.
Until now we have worked on the basis of reducing the number of active people monitored through login management. Your login controls the number and type of people you see. However recently we have created a details pop up box which activates when an alarm is set off. This means the monitoring person is presented with the details of the person responsible for the alarm and does not have to "do" anything. They can be presented with the procedure to follow as well, which makes the response much more efficient.
It is still a crazy thing to watch lots of alarms go off at once, but the software makes it possible to cope efficiently with this, without taking 10 years off the monitor's life, causing them to have a heart attack and creating another alarm.
