What type of service can you afford?
If you can afford approximately $30 a month and don’t have an issue with talking to professional employees at a monitoring center, choose a monitored medical alert.
If you can’t afford an ongoing monthly payment, look at the no-fee medical alerts, but research them carefully to understand the differences. (This site will help you.)
What type of unit is right for you?
If your house is relatively small, you can use a “base station communicator” type unit. What does small mean? If you can hear your answering machine (if you still have one) on full volume from anywhere in the house and can speak loudly enough that a microphone on the answering machine would pick up your voice, one of these units should be fine. Click here for a list of some good vendors.
If your house is large or you spend time outside where you would not be able to hear or talk to your “answering machine,” then you want to consider a unit that has two-way communication in the pendant that you wear. In this case, look at the MediPendant so that you can communicate with the monitoring center even if you’re at the far end of the house or outside. Click here for more info.
Other features
Return to the medical alert homepage.
You may also want to take a look at the medical alert technology page for a discussion of issues that are relevant for all medical alert devices.
