CCTV, integrated door access, lift control, and centralised UPS for Surya Home - designed to support staff supervision and reassure families, without imposing on the residents who live there.
Surya Home is a residential facility providing long-term care for adults with intellectual disability - a place where residents live their daily lives, and staff support that life with patience, structure, and constant attention. When the operator embarked on a full rebuild of the facility, Securevision was engaged under main contractor Stancel Construction to design and install the security and access systems for the new building. The brief was clear: support the staff who do the caring, reassure the families whose loved ones live here, and stay quietly out of the way of everyone else.
| Client | Surya Home |
|---|---|
| Stakeholders | Surya Home (operator) · Stancel Construction (main contractor) |
| Location | Singapore |
| Sector | Healthcare - Special-Needs Residential Care |
| Resident Profile | Adults with intellectual disability, long-term residential care |
| Care Considerations | Staff supervision in common and circulation areas · controlled lift access between floors · daytime family visits via verified entry · full external secure perimeter at night · resident dignity respected throughout the design |
| Project Type | New Building (full rebuild - upgrade and replace) |
| Awarded | May 2021 |
| Scale | 96 IP cameras · 2× 64-channel NVRs · 8 network switches · 59 access-controlled doors · 1 lift access controller · centralised UPS |
Surya Home is, before anything else, where its residents live. The men and women who live here may have lifelong cognitive support needs; some may not be able to advocate for themselves in the way most of us take for granted. The care staff who work here build relationships, learn individual routines, and handle sensitive situations with judgement that no system can replicate. Whatever security and access design we proposed had to start from that reality - not from a security threat model.
Operationally, the rebuild was a chance to do better than the legacy facility. A modern care building has staff-only zones (medication storage, archives, plant rooms), shared circulation areas where staff and residents move together, and resident living areas that should feel like home. Visiting families need easy access during daytime hours, and the building must secure itself properly at night without making residents feel locked in. Lift access between floors needs to be supervised, but lift travel cannot become a barrier to ordinary daily movement.
The security need, when it finally surfaced in the brief, was framed accordingly: not "how do we control the residents", but "how do we help the staff do their job, give the families peace of mind, and protect the building's perimeter at night without imposing on the daily life inside."
| Care Function | Old Building | Securevision Installation |
|---|---|---|
| Common-Area Awareness | Staff visual sweep - limited reach across multiple floors and rooms | 96 IP cameras across common areas and circulation, supporting (not replacing) staff supervision |
| Door Access | Mixed mechanical keys - slow to revoke when staff changed | 59 access-controlled doors on a single MicroEngine platform with central credential management |
| Lift Travel | Open lift access - no floor-by-floor control | Lift access controller integrated with the door access system - supervised travel between floors |
| Visitor & Family Entry | Manual reception sign-in | Verified entry at the main door tied into the access platform - daytime family visits supported, evening secure-down automatic |
| System Power | No co-ordinated UPS - outages affected systems individually | Centralised UPS backing the full security and access platform from a single resilient supply |
| Recording & Retention | Localised, inconsistent | Two 64-channel NVRs in a secured equipment room with consistent retention across all 96 cameras |
The temptation in any care setting is to over-secure. More doors, more locks, more controlled zones - easy to specify, easy to procure, and visibly "safer". But over-securing a residential care building turns it into an institution, and that is the opposite of what the operator was trying to achieve. The hard part of this design was deciding where access control belonged and where it did not.
We deployed access control where it served the care mission - staff-only zones, lift travel between floors, the main external entrance - and consciously left it out of the resident living areas. The 59-door footprint and the lift controller were sized to support staff supervision and family access management, not to lock residents into rooms or restrict their movement around the spaces they live in.
The result is a building that is genuinely secure at the perimeter and around its sensitive zones, while feeling like a home in the spaces where residents spend their day. Staff retain the supervisory tools they need; residents retain the daily freedom of movement that makes the building a place to live, not a place to be kept.
Securevision approached the new Surya Home as four overlapping design domains - each driven by a different aspect of the care brief, each tuned to support staff and respect residents.
IP cameras placed for common-area awareness - circulation, dining, communal spaces - never in private resident areas. Camera angles tuned to support staff supervision rather than to record individual residents.
Access-controlled doors at medication storage, archives, plant rooms, and administrative areas. Credentials tied to staff role, with central revocation when staff change - a quiet but important safeguard that mechanical keys cannot match.
The single lift controller integrates with the door access platform - supervised travel between floors without floor-by-floor doors becoming a daily friction. Staff and authorised visitors move freely; uncredentialled access is not possible.
Main entrance access tied into family-visiting hours, with full external secure-down at night. A centralised UPS backs the entire security and access platform - so a power blip never becomes a care incident.
Across all four domains, the design held to the same principle: every controlled door, every camera angle, and every credential rule had to justify itself against the care mission. If it didn't help staff or didn't reassure families, it didn't make it into the build.
Three coordinated layers - surveillance, access, and centralised power - deployed across the full building from a single management platform.
MicroEngine controllers managing every access-controlled door and the lift, on a single management platform. Credentials assigned by staff role, central revocation, and audit trail across the full building - all without resident-facing complexity.
Entry Access Control →IP cameras in common, circulation, and external areas - placed to support staff supervision and external perimeter awareness, never in private resident space. Two 64-channel NVRs in a secured equipment room give consistent retention across the full system.
Surveillance & Detection →A single centralised UPS backs the CCTV, access control, and network infrastructure - so a power interruption does not turn into a care incident. Eight network switches give the cameras and controllers a stable, resilient backbone.
Platform & Management →A coordinated CCTV, access control, and centralised power deployment for the rebuilt Surya Home - supporting daily care across staff-only zones, common areas, the lift, and the external perimeter.
Cameras: 96× Hikvision IP Cameras for common-area, circulation, and external coverage.
Recording: 2× 64-Channel NVRs in secured equipment room.
Door Access: 59 Doors on MicroEngine Platform.
Lift Access: Integrated MicroEngine Controller.
Resilience: Centralised UPS Deployment.
Network Backbone: 8× Managed Switches.
Care staff retain the supervisory reach they need across common areas, circulation, and the lift - without surveillance becoming a presence in the spaces residents live in.
Verified entry during visiting hours, full external secure-down at night - with the access platform handling the transition automatically rather than relying on manual lock-up routines.
CCTV, doors, lift, and power all coordinated through a single management view - so when the operator needs to check or change something, they go to one place rather than three different vendors.
The new Surya Home opened as a building that does its security job without ever drawing attention to it - exactly what a residential care setting needs.
It is easy to over-design for a care home. Every brief mentions risk; every conversation circles back to safeguarding. But the residents who live in a place like Surya Home are not a risk to be managed - they are people, in their home. The hardest part of this kind of design is restraint: putting access control where it serves the staff and the families, leaving it out where it would erode the daily life of the residents, and trusting that a quietly capable system is more useful than a visibly fortified one. We built Surya for the people we never expect to see use it.
Every project Securevision delivers draws on multiple systems working together - cameras, access control, intercoms, vehicle management, network infrastructure, and platform software. The cards below show the full range of systems we design and install. Each one links to a deeper explanation of how it works, when it is needed, and what to look for when specifying it.
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