Our story in Telecare began when our founder Henry left Schneider Electric’s smart home R&D center and created JOY Innovation, with a simple idea: use solid engineering and design to build products that quietly protect people and bring real joy.

Because of this combination of innovation and engineering capability, JOY Telecare was selected in 2009 as one of the first companies to participate in China’s national pilot programme on home-based elder care. We knew this would never be a high-margin business, but developing products for older people and improving their daily life matched our values, so we were glad to commit. Direct contact with older users and careful observation of real-world use only strengthened what we believed from day one: Telecare is not a toy and not consumer electronics. When an alarm button is pressed, there is no “second chance” – it is about life, safety and dignity.

At the same time, many people in the wider market still confuse low-cost personal/SOS alarms with professional Telecare systems. Riding the wave of global ageing, some vendors package these low-cost personal/SOS alarms as easy answers, but they remain gadgets rather than true Telecare services. Consumer watchdogs such as CHOICE in Australia have even issued “worst product” awards to some of these low-cost personal/SOS alarms, a clear reminder that life-safety functions must never be treated as an extra feature on a cheap gadget.

When a service grows to hundreds or thousands of users, most of the unreasonable expense comes from unplanned emergency call-outs and site visits, time spent on “mystery faults”, and many other operational efforts. From Henry’s experience, in the long run the total cost of using professional, stable and reliable systems is usually far lower than that of low-cost, non-professional products – and in many cases providers eventually have to scrap their investments in problematic systems and reinvest in professional solutions.

Telecare is also part of social welfare and community care, and many older people live on modest incomes, especially when they pay for services themselves. Public budgets are under pressure. Unfortunately, some products and systems on the market are sold at prices several times higher than well-designed professional alternatives, whether you look at cost per device or per user-month, pushing up long-term operating costs and shrinking coverage. When prices are this high, the people who most need support may be left out, and Telecare becomes unaffordable for many who would benefit most. So while performance and quality are non-negotiable for us, we work hard to keep overall system cost and pricing as reasonable as possible, so that more older people can genuinely benefit.

In practice, this means we always stick to a few simple principles:

• Avoid low-end, improvised devices and systems built around such components; they put safety at risk, behave like short-life gadgets, and often lead to high maintenance costs and can expose telecare service providers and their organisations to serious incidents and legal risks.
• Avoid connecting life-critical services to non-professional or consumer-grade IoT platforms, whose stability, reliability and data/privacy protection are not designed for Telecare and can create additional operational and legal risks.
• Design and control our own hardware, firmware and platforms, and manufacture them in our own specialised factory under a traceable quality system, keeping failure rates low and large-scale deployments stable and predictable.
• Focus on solutions that are professional, reliable and reasonable in both cost and price, so that more older people and people in need receive protection that is both dependable and truly affordable.