Medical alert for a mother-in-law who lives far away

Jacqui wrote:

Looking for a medical alert for a 77 year old had total knee replacement 3 months ago and suffered a fall 6 weeks ago lives alone and as much as she would like to believe there are friends she can count on in any situation there aren’t I live 1200 miles away and her daughter lives 600 miles away we are trying to find the best suitable device for her. it needs to be bidirectioinal and we would like to know if there is a system that can go with her and be used when she visits us, we have tried sifting through all the different systems but feel more confused when we finish.

My response:

Hi, Jacqui–

I’m so glad you wrote. I think you’ve got several choices here.

First off, a monitored alert is probably what you want. That way the monitoring company can find out what’s going on with each incident and send the right kind of help. Sometimes that might be a neighbor, sometimes an ambulance. I think your mother-in-law might be right that she’s got friends and neighbors who will help, but I suspect it’s only in a pinch and they don’t want to be “responsible” for her. A monitoring company would be able to call the neighbor with a specific request and the neighbor wouldn’t have to feel like they were in charge of your mother in law’s safety.

Or they could call YOU and you could figure out who to call locally.

Second, you can move any of these units from place to place. You just need to call the company to tell them where the person is, so they don’t send an ambulance to an empty house. The unit dials the same phone number no matter where you are.

As you know if you’ve looked around the website, I’m a big fan of the medipendant (http://getmedipendant.com) because you can talk right thought the pendant instead of having to shout to a speakerphone.

If your mother in law’s house is small (or it’s an apartment) then any of the “standard” medical alerts (lifestation, connect america, lifealert, bay alarm, etc, etc.) will work fine. Of these I like bay alarm best because of their really good pricing. I recently made a page comparing them to LifeStation (whoops: it’s not published yet. I guess I haven’t finalized it). It’s often hard to settle on which one is better because there are tradeoffs: LifeStation will refund unused months if you’ve paid in advance, and their customer service is 24/7, but over the lifetime of the service you’ll have paid several hundred dollars more for these advantages. Search for Bay Alarm on the website if you want to find the coupon code that saves you a little extra each month.

Anyway, see if the Medipendant meets your needs. They’re very helpful on the phone (1-888-216-0039) and I’ve heard only good things from other website visitors who’ve gone with them. They’re the same price as most of the “standard” services but the technology is better (and they also refund unused months if you’ve purchased a quarter or a year in advance).

Let me know how it works out, and if you have more questions.