Lone Worker system (Auto Dialler and escalation)

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Hi to all, I’m putting the feelers out there for an in-house solution to help with lone worker situations.

What I want is, some kind of basic IVR with a bit of intelligence behind it to place outbound calls, and I’m wondering if Asterisk is the place I should be looking.

What I want to happen is :

At the start of the shift, my employee calls a number, which is answered by the asterisk box. They get a prompt, please press 1 to sign on, 2 to check in, or 3 to sign out.

When they sign on, they are asked to key in two codes, one for them, and one for the site they’re working on.

Once the code has been keyed in, the system hangs up, and an internal timer starts.

The employee then has 90 minutes to call back in, this time they would “check in”. when they check in, they would be asked for their user number and site number again, which would be logged in a MySQL table somewhere for later manipulation, and teh timer reset… This pattern would continue until they sign out at the end of a shift.

IF the guard doesn’t call back in within 90 minutes, I’d want the system to dial out to them and put them on the above menu, but this time recording the call

Once the employee has checked in, teh timer would reset. if they failed to provide the same employee ID as the one that’s stored on teh record for the number dialled, or if they were unreachable, the system would call a supervisor number to alert them, offer to play back a recording of the call, and sound the alarm.

If someone with some knowledge could give me an idea of how much of this is already in Asterisk, and how much could be iplemented at cost, that would be great :smile:

2

Asterisk can definitely do this. It has all the IVR and outbound dialing capabilities you need. From the simplicity of the system, it can be done in a day or two worth of coding + testing, once you lay out the exact logic you’d need.

I can build it for you if you’d like, feel free to PM me to discuss.

3

[quote=“jpsharp”]Asterisk can definitely do this. It has all the IVR and outbound dialing capabilities you need. From the simplicity of the system, it can be done in a day or two worth of coding + testing, once you lay out the exact logic you’d need.

I can build it for you if you’d like, feel free to PM me to discuss.[/quote]

good to hear, I’ll PM you after the festivities, it’ll give me a chance to flowchart what the application needs to do… Is Asterisk scripting fairly straightforward to tweak further down the line? I haven’t had much of a chance to read up, but I’m assuming that I can have it set up to use a SIP line as a primary, and then a PSTN line as a backup via a telephony card? This would be the only use of the system (i.e. it’s never going to become a PABX for the office), so I’m guessing I won’t need to go too overboard on the card?

Cheers
PG

4

Sounds good. Depending on how extensive the logic needs to be, it can be simply done in the dialplan or it can be done with an external script that Asterisk runs and that script would be written in a language like Perl.

For PSTN interface, you can do a card with as many channels of simultaneous access you need.