Expanding Customer Care with New Remote Assistance Services
Arkéa On Life is a new business unit of the French Crédit Mutuel Arkéa group dedicated to connected living and home security.
There were several solutions on the market, we looked at other well-known cloud services but HiveMQ is the only one that really supports MQTT. That transparency is important for our development process. We highly value the full MQTT support HiveMQ provides.
The ambition of the Arkéa On Life team is to make technology useful for everyone. Arkéa On Life combines the Arkéa Assistance subsidiary that specializes in providing remote assistance to individuals and Arkéa Sécurité that provides property monitoring and remote worker protection.
In 2016, Arkéa On Life added a unique touch screen tablet to their range of connected assistance devices (the Arkéa On Life alert button and connected watch). The trio of home assistance devices has proven to successfully prolong the autonomy of people who may require assistance by an average of 3 years. The connected tablet expands the remote assistance services that Arkéa On Life offers subscribers with intuitive technology that focuses on simplified handling. In combination with the Arkéa On Life smartphone app, customers benefit from a thoughtfully integrated set of support services:
A private social network to stay in touch with loved ones and family through video calls, photos, and text.
Video assistance to interact with remote call center counselors.
Connected health care to seek the advice of a general practitioner 24/7.
Arkéa On Life’s tablet is far more than a telecare transmitter for emergency alerts, it is a tool for social inclusion that provides greater flexibility for people to interact with relatives and loved ones.
Arkéa On Life Relies on HiveMQ to Monitor and Update Its Fleet of Devices
Arkéa On Life implements HiveMQ to monitor and update their connected tablets. Each tablet has a local MQTT broker that coordinates communication between numerous microservices. All of the local brokers are synchronized with HiveMQ over a custom bridge. The tablets are connected to HiveMQ so that the Arkéa On Life team can continuously monitor and interact with every device. Through HiveMQ, Arkéa On Life support personnel can troubleshoot, update, and adjust devices down to the smallest detail with great efficiency.
Reliable, Secure Communication is at the Heart of Every Alert System
When Arkéa On Life began development on their tablet in 2016, they determined that several factors made MQTT the logical choice for their project:
The MQTT protocol is specifically designed for IoT use cases and connected devices
Bandwidth was a concern, they wanted the most efficient network utilization possible
The structure of MQTT guarantees reliable bi-directional message delivery
To find the right MQTT platform for their cloud, Arkéa On Life performed a series of benchmarks. In the end, HiveMQ topped the list as the most reliable solution:
Scalable messaging volume with extremely fast throughput and minimal latency
High availability due to HiveMQ’s elastic clustering environment
Open a flexible plugin system
100% compliance with the MQTT specification
In 2018, Arkéa On Life introduced a smart home solution for security and automation. Through a similarly designed connected tablet, customers can orchestrate the functions of intelligent home devices. Security features include connection to a 24-hour call center and the ability to alert the appropriate local authorities for protection against any risk of burglary or fire.
"MQTT makes it easy to redesign the tablet for different use cases. Abstracting the technology for different modules of automation and configuring different levels of rules is extremely simple in MQTT, both on the local device level and on the server. We plan to introduce version 2 of our tablet in the near future and will definitely continue with MQTT and HiveMQ."
Arkéa On Life currently runs HiveMQ on Amazon Web Services (AWS). They have developed their own MQTT client authorization plugin for HiveMQ and use a Kibana infrastructure for data visualization, application monitoring, and operational intelligence. The HiveMQ dashboard adds quick access to the key metrics of their HiveMQ installation. The dashboard allows Arkéa On Life administrators to closely examine information for each client and quickly identify irregular client behavior. Over the next few years, Arkéa On Life expects to connect more than 30,000 subscribers with their tablets. There are already many plans underway for solutions that will bring new technological innovation into the daily lives of Arkéa On Life customers.
"Next, we plan to migrate to HiveMQ Cloud. We are very excited about moving to a less restrictive environment and are confident that HiveMQ will continue to give us excellent support as we expand our range of services."
