Best Medical Alerts for People in Rural Areas
People living in rural areas should consider their network connectivity when choosing the best medical alert system for their requirements. If cell phone coverage is weak in spots, it’s important to trace out the user’s routine movements to make sure the coverage will be adequate to the lifestyle.
If the user is spending most of the time at home, a landline phone connection may be all that’s required. If so, test the communication between the base station that plugs into the phone jack, and the pendant or clip-on with the alarm button, that the user wears. Many alert systems will range as much as 1,000 feet away, some using their own proprietary signal independent of cellular network. In rural areas, home-based distances may well be greater: to the mailbox, to a barn or workshop, to the garden, and so on.
One note before starting. Testing all the routes of the user’s daily living for a good connection may take a few days to map out reliably. So one of the first things to establish when shopping for the best alert system is the return and refund policy, and the total costs of signing up and canceling. Even when you think you have the best system, you can’t be certain until you test it out in your location.
One other note about the landline connection. If the cellular network is spotty in your home location, then establish what your landline wiring consists of. The original phone network across America was copper wiring, which also carried a small electrical current to power the phone. Even if the electricity supply to the house was lost, the phone would still work.
Roughly one-third of Americans still maintain a landline service, but a portion of that no longer relies on the original phone lines; instead, the landline is run over the Internet, either through cable or cellular. So, ascertain these things when thinking about outages, and having a redundant system as a backup in an emergency. Include battery life in your research also, since this part of your shopping has to do with maintaining connectivity during outages.
Cellular Connectivity
Many medical alert providers offer a home system that will either connect to the landline or to the area cellular network for an extra monthly charge. Make an inventory of devices. Does the user have a mobile phone, and if so, how well does the connectivity hold up inside the house, and within distances from the house?
For many rural seniors, the choice ultimately comes down to how they live rather than where they live. Someone who spends nearly all day inside a small house with reliable telephone service may be well served by a relatively simple in-home system. Someone who gardens, tends livestock, works in a workshop or regularly walks around a large property may need a mobile/GPS device with dependable cellular coverage and sufficient battery life.
GPS is important if the user goes significantly far from the home. Remember that, in an emergency, responders still have to locate the person, even if they have the home address. GPS should narrow the radius down to a short enough distance to spot the user by line of sight.
On that score, establish what time it may take for emergency services to get to your location. It may be that a friendly neighbor lives closer, and may be willing to be included in the list of contacts for the answering system to notify.
Continuing this theme, for an isolated individual it may make sense to have a routine check-in of some kind that notifies an automated system that all is well. This can be done without disturbing another person, using reminders that may only require a keystroke or phone tap to acknowledge. Make a sensible escalation ladder for the system to go up if there’s no response.
Fall detection as an useful option will depend on the user’s daily routines. For a mobile user outside the home, cellular connectivity will matter: there’s no point detecting a fall if the device can’t call out an alarm. And if the terrain is rugged, clambering about might tend to produce more false alarms, although fall detection is continually getting better at learning movements.
For a user staying mostly indoors, an in-home system that silently monitors in the background may also be an alternative to the traditional wearable device. Homes are getting smarter, and an always-on background system can learn a user’s movements and detect radical departures from the routine: a fall at night, sudden motion or prolonged inactivity, etc.
Privacy is a concern with such monitoring, but again, creating a sensible escalation ladder can avoid intrusiveness and still raise alarms in a gradual way. That said, a check-in system is only a complement and not a substitute for a defined emergency alarm. Appropriate devices, combined with a suitable community and care network, make the ideal mix.
