What is a call for help necklace?

If you have a fall or accident in your house, you press the button and help comes.

At least, that’s the way the companies that sell these devices try to market them. In reality it’s a little more complicated.

Here’s why. As far as I know, no one has yet tried to market a pendant that offers direct communication with an alarm monitoring center or with 911 operators. This is probably because this is still a technical challenge, but it’s also because this industry seems to be a few years behind the curve.

So instead you have a system where the pendant has to communicate with a base station, which then dials the medical alert monitoring company, your family & friends, or 911.

In most systems the base station is basically a speakerphone that knows how to dial certain numbers. When you press the emergency button on your call for help necklace, the base unit turns on and dials the emergency phone numbers you have set up in it. And the speakerphone turns on so you can communicate with the person who picks up on the other end.

Before you buy a call for help necklace, it’s important to understand how powerful the speakerphone is. Will it reach to every part of your house? Will you be able to hear the emergency operator? Will they be able to hear you?

It’s also important to understand what steps you need to take to keep the call for help necklace working. Do you need to keep it dry? Will the batteries need to be changed? Does it automatically tell you if the batteries are low? Can you test the system from time to time to make sure it’s working?