Why was it a waste of time? Although it was raised by a spammer, several posters have had additional questions or provided new information. Several of the original participants are participating in this revival.
While we do often close zombies raised by spammers, this thread seems to me to show sufficient signs of life to remain open.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I agree. My mother has one of those, and the original thread, and several of the “revival” posters have given me some useful info.
Actually, I’ve lived alone for a long time and have often wondered about this. I am far too young to require any sort of Life Alert system. Occasionally, when doing chores involving heavy lifting or extremely sharp objects, I wonder what SOP is if I lop my own hand off with an ax while chopping firewood. I manage to stumble into the house (or have my cell on me) to call 911.
Then what?
Presumably, they have to break down my door because I’ve bled out so much I passed out before I could go unlock it.
If they let my cat out, will someone go chase him down and bring him back? Or is Mr. Kitty SOL?
If they can get in without breaking down the door, does anyone have enough sense to lock my goddamn door before they cart me off to the ER?
Chances are, if I’m that seriously injured, I will not care at the time. But when I get home, assuming I lived, I’ll be mighty pissed to arrive and find all my electronics gone and my cat gone rogue.
My MIL has one of those, and has used it a few times. The service calls 911 as needed, then our place. Once they broke in through the back door and blocked it closed before they left, so we stashed a key outside for them. The latest time, the key wasn’t there (I found about six assorted emergency people milling around outside the front door; they blamed it on one of their people who is known for shoving things in his pocket and forgetting them), so brother-in-law put up a garage-door opener with a combination keypad. The service and the 911 operators both have the number.
She has an intercom box on a phone near the centre of her house, but it can’t hear her everywhere. We’ll have to look into one that works through her pendant.
I have an electronic push-button deadbolt on the back door for this reason.
Here in Minneapolis (and probably other cities) the fire/EMT will call the police if they have to forcibly enter the house and transport the occupant to a hospital. The local police have a list of emergency carpentry services that can fix the door or board it up temporarily. One of them will be called, and the police will stay there until they arrive and start work.
But the homeowner does get the bill for this (maybe including charges for after-hours service), and has to pay it. But if breaking down your door and hauling you off to the hospital saved your life, I suppose paying the bill is acceptable. Besides, insurance might cover some of it.
So it only works if one is home? I guess that makes sense; if one is elsewhere then there are probably other people around.
But I’m still very surprised. I have a very well-developed sense for weasel words and other deceptive advertising practices, and I never noticed anything like this in the tv ads. I’ll pay more attention next time I see one.
What do you think is deceptive about the ads?
Consider these devices like the OnStar system in certain cars. Even when the car transmits an emergency signal to OnStar (e.g. when the airbags deploy) the OnStar operator checks in with you first, then contacts emergency services.
When a user presses the button on their pendant, the company contacts the user via the open microphone system, to find out what the problem is, first. Since customers could use the pendant for everything from a fall to chest pains to “safe, but too weak to get out of this chair” to a fire cutting them off from phone/extinguisher, or even feeling lonely and needing to hear a human voice, it makes sense to “triage” the situation and contact the appropriate respondent (neighbor, family member or 911) as needed.
They also only work if the person is willing to use it. My 90-year-old grandma has one but in two situations where she should have, she didn’t. Both turned out okay, but what’s the point of the service if somebody’s too stubborn to use it?
And no we didn’t push it on her, I think it was her idea. Did I mention stubborn? Because I come by my stubborn streak quite naturally!
It happened to my father-in-law. Actually he had fallen asleep and rolled over on the button. They called, and when he didn’t respond, they called EMS.
When he didn’t respond to paramedics knocking, they went around to the back, broke a window and let themselves in that way.
I worked for a Lifeline service about 15 years ago. It was a non-profit organization run from a local Senior’s Care facility. We had a mass of volunteers that demonstrated, installed and serviced the units, as well as call center and support staff.
The system consisted of a button on a wrist band or pendant and a good quality speaker phone base unit. The button activated an alarm in the 24 hr call center, and the staff would try to contact the client with the speaker phone. If the client needed help or we could not contact them, we would start calling responders to check on them. Responders were usually neighbours and would either have a key or would be told the location of a key. Appropriate emergency services would be notified as necessary.
The system was regularly tested and false alarms were common. Some clients liked the service and others didn’t of course. For many it was something that would allow them to continue living independently for a few more years. For others it was just another annoyance in an increasingly annoying world.
There are a number of products on the market, some of which would be set up to simply dial 911 which the local emergency services was not especially keen about. For the service to be effective, it has to be sensitive and false alarms were part of the bargain.
I am not sure where the technology is now that GPS and cell phone communication have advanced so much.
Now that I’m officially ancient (65), I’m considering getting something like this. My partner lives next door, but is often away on business, and I’m really not very close to any other neighbors. I’m wondering if the devices work out in the yard. I sure could have used one a few weeks ago, when I fell into a couple feet of snow, and literally couldn’t get up. If I’d been wearing one of the devices I definitely would have used it.
I like the idea of a combination lock on the door, or a key safe.
Yes, probably.
My mother’s worked over most of the farmyard on a 40-acre farm. If she was outside like in her garden or the orchard, or in the front paddocks, it worked fine. If she was inside the older (wooden) barns, it usually worked, but inside the newer (metal-sided) riding arena it generally did not get through. (She would, of course, not have been able to respond to the speakerphone at those location, but from most of them she could at least have signaled for help.)
The monitoring service was quite willing to spend quite a bit of time with 2 of her kids, testing out the range of it. One of us outside with the signal device, on a walkie-talkie with the other inside near the speakerphone.
Also, they had a regularly scheduled ‘communications test’ time each month, where they activated the system and spoke to her via the speakerphone. I believe that for an additional price, this could be scheduled to happen every week or even every day.
I think the word you’re looking for is “proud”. No, no, my grandmother isn’t too proud to admit that the reason she fell down and couldn’t get up might have anything to do with her being 96, why do you ask? She’s also not deaf due to obsolescence of original parts, we all just talk too low. (And yes, she also asked for the bracelet herself).
I don’t know about the bracelet itself and what data can it transmit, but she lives in a 3M-people city; emergency services may be reaching her from a number of locations, or even have already been on the road after a different service. Giving them keys to her flat is a lot less practical than having several neighbors hold keys for each other. My cousin discovered that the net-café downstairs has keys for pretty much anybody in the building who’s over age 80.