I am working on it, I promise. I realize I am in a special situation living pretty much off the grid. We had a discussion tonight about doing something about spotty cell phone service. We did finally get on the 911 map last year. So if I can get them on the phone they will be able to find me. My worry now is what if I am totally knocked out or in a coma.
There’s no way to control everything, maybe I can diminish the danger though.
A better idea would be using the kitchen sink. Equally effective, and less squicky.
There are plenty of electronic faucets already in use (usually in public restrooms). How hard could it be to hook up a connection to the internet-of-things?
Or how about the light switch in the bedroom?
Anything not used for 24 hours would send an alert.
I read that postal workers will sometimes notify authorities when a resident mail is not being picked up. I can’t find an official site that describes this, but tip number six [here](http://menta Click control thelfloss.com/article/81826/14-secrets-us-postal-carriers) mentioned it.
Aha - did some more Googling and found it: it’s called the Carrier Alert program.
Obviously, if you’ve collapsed on the floor, any help from that program might not arrive in time. But at least in theory your absence should be spotted within a couple of days.
My husband’s grandmother lived alone when she was hit by a sudden severe devastating stroke. Thank heaven she was just barely able to get to the phone and call 911, or it would’ve been several days before she was found.
This has been a thought-provoking thread. Thanks to all who pitched in, or will.
Rural carrier route at the farm. Back in the day, call it 1994, I was javing a bad time with pneumonia and several times my carrier came to the door because I wasn’t visible in the living room or desk area windows at a time I normally would be.
A few years ago, when poster Khadaji died of the flu, his dog died also before he was found. 
I thought about that a lot.
It just wasn’t something that was on my radar. I was about 40 during the incident I described, and after some rest I was fine. It still seems like a fluke. I’m barely 50 now, and in general, my health has been excellent.
On the other hand, I saw a William Holden movie last night and was reading a bit about him today. Slipped on a rug, hit his head on a table, and bled to death. He was only 63 at the time, but was a very heavy drinker and intoxicated at the time. There were signs that he was conscious. Don’t know if he couldn’t, or just chose not to call for help.
You know, women’s clothing REALLY has no pockets. And it is convenient to leave your phone in another room, either in the charger or the internet radio player. It is also anooying to have your phone on you at all times, unless you silence the sound of all those alerts. (And then, obviously, forget to put the sound back on, causing other problems.Does anyone know of a way to silence a phone for a set period of time ( other then the night?)
But anyway, I was thinking of ways to make it an easier habit to carry the phone on me. Like many women, I often carry my phone in my bra. It looks stupid, and falls out when I bend over to pick something up, but hey, easy to get out and in.
I just got word from the people at Etsy that they don’t want to make my custom easier version of this arm cuff phone carrier. Please, someone good with leather make these and become rich selling them ( Broomstick?) Purses like these are no good: whever I move, they fall to the front and are in the way.
But it’s hard to make a habit of carrying a phone at home. I often like to wear an apron when I’m pottering about the house, and the phone goes in my apron pocket. An apron has the added benefit of protecting my clothes and it’s comfortable and doesn’t make me look fat of nerdy. It makes me look like I’m at home, at ease, baking something, which is a look I like to have 
Anyone know of other really handy pouches or something like that are a pleasure to wear in any weather? For men, there’t the phone belt clip pouch.
I worry about my mom, who is 80 and lives alone. I’ve talked with her about wearing a device, but she tried that for a while, and it irritated her skin – which is very fragile. She points out that she has a phone in every room, but I’d like some sort of failsafe. I love the idea of a toilet that emails the kids if you don’t use it for 24 hours. But I don’t think that’s for sale, and besides, she likes her toilet and doesn’t want a new one.
She is computer literate, but I don’t think she wants the bother an having to write an email every day. (something she suggested, but hasn’t implemented.)
Maybe I should research the Nest, or other IOT devices.
One thing to think about is how quickly you need the system to notice something is wrong.
If your goal is to avoid having people discover a really smelly corpse, then a day or two is fine. If you want to get help to potentially survive a condition, then it potentially has to be much sooner.
For that reason, you probably want a passive system, rather than one where you have to take specific actions. A once-a-day phone call is fine, but no one wants hourly checkins.
The toilet flush sensor is a good idea. That likely reduces the unknown time down to a couple hours, and most people use the toilet first thing in the morning and last thing at night as well. You could make something with a float that sat in the tank and talked over wifi, so you wouldn’t need a new toilet.
Lots of places are adding “smart” electric meters. I bet it wouldn’t be hard to scrape the data to figure out if someone is doing stuff. There’s a drop at night when all the lights turn out, and a spike in the morning when they first come on. You do have to deal with noise like refrigerator compressor cycling, but I bet you could tease enough signal out of the rest as long as you don’t have electric heat.
Puzzlegal, I asked the NEST people thru Facebook. They say the NEST is not equipped to do what I described. Yet. The technical potential is there, but they use it as a burglar alarm that detects movement when the owner is not at home, and then tells the owner thru the NEST app that movement has been detected. Nest has not adapted this possibility into a device against dying alone, yet. Maybe if more people asked them about it? Nest It’s a pity. Most people are hesitant to set up some kind of alarm; it’s just not pleasant to think about such stuff at all, so it feels nicer not to think about it. We’re irrational beings. So it would be better if any security object would also have another, not stigmatizing function. Like a smartphone or a smoke alarm.
NEST answered me like this:
A small, basic cellphone the person wears on themselves. If an elderly person is in a bad enough situation that they can’t use a cellphone (e.g.: passed out), the odds of being saved by someone checking several hours later seem slim. I suppose they could be physically able but too confused. If you’re liable to be too confused to use a basic cellphone, living on your own is going to end badly.
You could have several internet-linked cameras throughout the person’s dwelling which could be checked periodically. I think most people would balk at this.
I bet the government has some stats on death in the manner we are talking about. As the boomers age up these numbers will no doubt rise. Come on tech people, there is money to be made here.
Actor Guy Williams(Zorro/John Robinson) died alone in his apartment in Argentina, and when found had been dead about a week.
I need to research things a bit and I’ll get back to you on that. Did they say why they didn’t want to make it?
I live alone on a small farm, so I made a deal with two of my kids that I would email them every morning so they’d know I made it through the night. I chose to send to two people because I figured it’s hard to notice the lack of something, maybe one or the other would not notice, but not both on the same day. I couldn’t stand the thought of my dogs starving to death. It would be weeks before anyone would realize I was gone if I didn’t have the email thing going. I also wear a life alert button for something like a fall in the house, but that’s no help working out on the land. I try to make the emails short, amusing or pithy.
True, the gender politics of pockets. It’s a thing.
I use a hip bag a bit like this. Sometimes.
I was thinking: an exercise watch could have an alarm system, couldn’t it? You’d have to wear it all the time, of course. If it can count steps it can also count the lack of steps and send out an alarm signal. Some are quite small and subtle.
I suggested they’d sew a patch of velcro to the cuff, and I’d glue a patch of the other velcro part on the phone’s case. But she didn’t want to do that because she thought that velco wouldn’t hold and then she’d be liable for phone that fell off the cuff and broke.
I just did this suggestion to https://thephonepurse.com/ as well.
My mother has a medical alert necklace; it’s connected by RF to a machine which will ping its masters if she presses the button or if it’s without current for more than five minutes. Other models track heartbeat (bracelets, I’ve never heard of a necklace with this feature). The medical alert company also call occasionally as a random check (they try her home phone first, and if she doesn’t answer, the cell). She used to not want to get one (that’s for old people!) but after breaking her ankle and spending a couple of hours on the floor a few years back, her first stop on the way out of the ER was getting the necklace.
I move so often that this kind of solution becomes highly complicated; probably should set up something along the lines of “whatsapp my brothers every morning”.