Traditional nurse callActive
Room 214
No further information.
Walk down and find out
A nurse call for the 21st century
Every nurse call tells you where. Foreword tells you why.
A light over a door means somebody needs something. It doesn't say what. So your staff walk down the hall to find out, then walk back for whatever it was. Foreword speaks with the resident, listens to the answer, and hands it to your team before they leave the station.
ForewordAnswered in 4s
Room 214 · Margaret C.
I've dropped my glasses and I can't find them.
Request · not urgent
The problem
Your staff are walking blind.
Traditional nurse call has exactly one signal: somebody in this room pressed a button. A cardiac event and a dropped remote light the same lamp. The information your team needs to respond well only exists once they've already arrived.
Every call looks the same
Triage happens after the walk instead of before it. The most urgent call in the building waits its turn behind a request for a magazine.
The double trip
Arrive, learn what's needed, leave to fetch it, come back. Two trips for a job that could have been one — on every shift, in every wing.
Silence in between
From the moment the button is pressed until somebody appears, the resident waits alone with no idea whether anyone heard.
One trip, not two
Arrive knowing.
When a resident calls, Foreword answers out loud, right there in the room. It asks what they need, listens, and passes the answer to your team along with the room number. The resident hears immediately that somebody is coming. Your caregiver arrives with the blanket already in hand.
What the resident hears
Within a second of pressing the button:
I've called for help, and someone is on their way. Tell me what you need, and I'll pass it along.
What your staff see
Before they leave the station:
Room 118 — I'm cold, could I have another blanket?
Local, not cloud
Your internet goes down. Your nurse call doesn't.
Foreword runs in your building. The AI that hears the call, watches for falls, and holds a conversation lives on a device in the room and a server in your closet — not in somebody else's data centre. There is no round trip to the internet in the call path, because there is no internet in the call path.
The call path never leaves the building
A resident presses a button, speaks, and staff are alerted — entirely over your own network. An ISP outage is an inconvenience for your email. It is not an event for your nurse call.
The AI is in the room
Speech recognition, fall detection, and conversation all run on the edge device at the bedside. Nothing is streamed out for a server somewhere else to think about.
Nothing to leak in transit
Video and audio don't leave the room, because they never need to. What leaves is an alert: a room, a name, a sentence.
Cloud-hosted nurse call means your residents' ability to call for help depends on a fibre line, a data centre, and a vendor's uptime page. We didn't think that was a reasonable thing to ask of an 87-year-old at three in the morning.
Three jobs, one device
Listens. Sees. Speaks.
One unit in the room doing three jobs that would otherwise be three vendors, three contracts, and three sets of wiring.
Voice nurse call
Hands-free calling by voice, alongside the buttons and pendants your residents already know. It understands what's being asked and routes it by urgency.
Fall detection
On-device vision watches for falls and checks in out loud when it sees one — "Are you okay?" — so a fall isn't discovered an hour later on rounds.
Companion
Residents can simply talk to it, about whatever they like. Loneliness is a health outcome, and the quiet hours between visits are where it lives.
Modular
Start with the call system. Add the rest when you're ready.
You don't have to buy all of it to buy any of it. Begin with the nurse call — buttons, pendants, the staff dashboard — and switch on fall detection and voice in the rooms and wings where they earn their keep. Nothing needs ripping out to add the next piece.
START HERE
Nurse call
Buttons, pendants, bathroom pulls, and a staff dashboard that shows every call, who answered, and how long it took.
ADD WHEN READY
Fall detection
Add the edge device to memory care first, or to the rooms with the highest fall risk. Room by room, wing by wing.
ADD WHEN READY
Voice & companion
Turn on conversation where it helps most. Residents who want it get it; residents who don't, don't.
Infrastructure
It runs on the Wi-Fi you already have.
No proprietary radio. No repeater units in the corridors. No licensed frequency, no site survey for a radio mesh you'll be maintaining for a decade. Foreword devices join your network the way everything else in the building already does.
No repeaters to buy
Legacy wireless nurse call needs repeater hardware spread through the building to carry a proprietary signal. That's capital cost, installation, and a second network to maintain. Foreword uses the one you have.
No cable pulls
Hardwired call points mean conduit, ceilings, and a construction schedule. Battery devices and Wi-Fi mean a screw and a PIN.
Standard hardware
Nothing here is exotic. When a part fails in year six, it's a part you can still buy — not a discontinued board from a vendor who's moved on.
Privacy
The resident decides what the camera does. Not the building.
Five privacy levels, chosen by the resident from their own phone, changed whenever they like. Staff can see live video — or a stick-figure outline and nothing more — or no video at all.
Every one of those settings still detects falls. Even with the camera view off entirely. That's only possible because the AI is in the room: the image never has to go anywhere for something to notice she's on the floor.
Why now
The math stopped working.
1 in 4
adults 65+ fall each year, and falls are the leading cause of injury death in that age group.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Edge AI
Speech recognition and pose estimation now run in the room, on a device the size of a paperback. That wasn't true five years ago. It's why this product exists now and not then.
Staffing
Operators are covering more residents with fewer people. Every avoidable walk down a corridor is time taken from somebody who needed it.
Arrive knowing.
We're running pilots with senior living operators now. If you'd like to see it working, we'll show you a live system — not a slide deck.
Book a demo