Airmax Remote appointed by St John Ambulance as exclusive provider of telematics solutions across their blue light fleet of 550 vehicles

12th June 2023 – Airmax Remote, the vehicle telematics and data services provider, today announced that St John Ambulance has implemented Airmax Remote’s specialist solution for emergency fleets, ‘RESPONSE’ , which, ensures that critical, onboard, life-saving technology can be monitored remotely to provide a full 360 vehicle of their fleet in real time, delivery mission critical data to keep their fleet moving.

A key feature is to monitor their Ancillary battery life which is essential to ensuring that critical, life-saving technology onboard the emergency vehicle is always fully operational. With RESPONSE, monitoring the shoreline connection, evidences if a vehicle has its ancillary equipment charged and operationally ready thereby preventing any outages. In addition, vehicle diagnostic faults can now be monitored in real-time as part of an internal monitoring tool via IoT connectivity, which ensures that any defects can be diagnosed to ensure vehicle downtime is kept to a minimum with triaging in place ahead of any technician visit the vehicle, thereby ensuring minimal vehicle downtime and effective resource management.

The partnership with St John completes the trio of emergency service organisations benefitting from solutions delivered by Airmax. It is Airmax’ intent to be pioneers in establishing a national standard for the UK’s emergency services, by delivering the most robust technology and information capture that is all designed and manufactured in Great Britain.

As part of the overall solution and roll out, the St John front line vehicles will see the telematics device integrate to the ‘genisys™’ switching and power management system, provided by Ring Carnation. Combined with Airmax Response creates a fully connected intelligent solution, ensuring the organisation that critical on-board devices and procedures are followed or vehicles are performing as intended by back office monitoring systems.

 With over 31,000 charity volunteers supporting St John, Airmax’ RESPONSE will identify each driver using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to support and meet compliance requirements by automating vehicle log books. RESPONSE will also enable a full 360 degree view of vehicle activity with multiple ancillary equipment being monitored inc. 999, front blues, rear reds and siren. As a result, RESPONSE, empowers St John to receive mission-critical data in, real time that monitors the performance of the vehicle, fleet availability and business intelligence.

Commenting on the partnership with St John Ambulance, Richard Perham, Managing Director, Airmax Remote, said: “Airmax Remote has over twenty years’ experience of working with the emergency services and the partnership with a blue-light emergency services provider with the stature of St John Ambulance is a massive endorsement of Airmax Remote’s RESPONSE solution, which is fast becoming the de-facto standard for blue-light fleets.”

The strategy for the 550 vehicles operated by St John is to reduce vehicle downtime and provide insight for operational deployment requirements whilst enhances duty-of-care with targeted driver training. Airmax will also provide remote vehicle diagnostics via IoT connectivity that is essential to ensuring effective uptime on an emergency service fleet.

From a duty-of-care perspective driving ambulances and other emergency vehicles poses many dangers. According to research released by the Fire Protection Research Foundation, more than 500 fatalities and 28,000 injuries were linked with ambulance crashes between 1990 and 2015. Telematics can monitor driver behaviour and report information on activities such as speeding and harsh breaking to fleet managers. They can then advise drivers on how to drive safer and prevent accidents using this data. 

Phil Howard, National Fleet Manager for St John Ambulance comments: “Our vehicles often respond to difficult incidents, in which consistent performance is essential to support our life-saving work. With the partnership and functionality delivered by Airmax Remote’ RESPONSE solution, we now have access to IoT connectivity and full insights, thanks to Airmax advancement in data accuracy compared to the general marketplace which can be monitored remotely without the need to visit a vehicle. In addition, remote monitoring of the vital battery-powered life-saving technology operated from our fleet of emergency vehicles ensures that we have no outages and critical equipment is maintained to a high standard.”

Dr Julie Gandolfi of Driving Research Ltd says ‘Telematics data from emergency vehicles is an essential tool in enabling driver risk management interventions to be targeted where they are most urgently needed.  Data from telematics systems can be used to identify drivers whose day-to-day driving behaviours show elevated risk, before that risk develops into an incident.  Behavioural interventions can then be deployed exactly where they are needed, to increase those drivers’ awareness of their risk and assist them in developing safer strategies and implement continuous self-evaluation in future.’