Which medical alert for a woman with poor balance

Kay wrote, “I’m looking for a medical alert for myself. I live alone and am sometimes unsteady on my feet. I’ve been looking at Bay Alarm.”

Here’s what I wrote back:

Hi, Kay–

Great timing! You’re email arrived at just the right moment to get a quick response. Bay Alarm is a great company and I highly recommend them, as long as your situation is right. Bay uses a “base station speakerphone” system so you have to be within voice range of the base station in order to have a conversation with the monitoring center. Where this gets tricky is if your house is big, or you often have loud music playing, or you spend a lot of time in the yard, or anything else that would make it hard to communicate.

Note that if they _can’t_ hear you they’ll still send help, so it’s better than not getting a system at all.

One of the situations where this can make a big difference is if you fall and need help getting up, but you aren’t hurt and you don’t need an ambulance. If you can communicate this to the monitoring center, they’ll call a neighbor or someone else on your contact list. But if you can’t, they’ll assume the worst and send the emergency responders.

So, if your days are spent close enough to the base station that you can communicate easily, Bay is a great option because they are the most affordable I know of and they’re run by good people. (I learned yesterday that their prices are going up by $2 per month on Friday Feb 16, 2013, and remember that you can save $1 per month with the coupon code “Joe”.)

If what I’ve written makes you think Bay isn’t right for you, take a look at the Medipendant. It’s a system where you can actually talk and listen right through the emergency pendant, so you can be up to 600′ from the base station. I just put up a video today explaining the whole issue: https://findtherightalert.com/all-about-the-medipendant. (They also offer a coupon code for my readers: in this case you save $2 per month if you mention you found it on “elderly medical”.)