****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
After my dad passed, my mom wanted to stay in her house but has some health problems and is also a fall risk, so we knew we needed SOMETHING for her to wear so she could get help if she needed it. We started researching and found a dizzying number of solutions, most requiring a monthly subscription fee that connects you to a call center. Since mom is on a fixed income, we didn't want to burden her with a monthly fee so we focused more on our options that wouldn't require a monthly fee. Out of all the options we found, we chose this one for a variety of reasons.First, we liked the fact that we could program it with a call sequence. If mom holds down the red button for two seconds it will first dial my sister. If she doesn't answer live, it then calls me. If I don't answer, it will try her neighbor across the street. And finally, if she can't reach any of us, it calls 911. When the call is answered it plays a pre-recorded message letting the answerer know that this is a distress call and then lets them talk to my mother. We loved the fact that it doesn't immediately go right to 911, which can avoid needless emergency calls if she accidentally triggers it. (But you DO have to hold the button down for 2 seconds to activate it, which helps avoid "misfires" from momentary accidental button presses.)The second feature we love is that the pendant has both a microphone and speaker built into it. Some similar units have a smaller pendant but don't have a mic and speaker in it. They rely on a base unit that sits somewhere in the house and acts as a speaker phone. If the base was in the kitchen and my mother fell in the bedroom, the bathroom, or the sun porch, it would be impractical for her to yell loud enough for the base unit to hear her and she would not be able to hear the answerer speaking back to her. So the mic and speaker inside the pendant work great (and in tests we did the call quality is outstanding).The rechargeable battery lasts about 30 days and it comes with a spare battery inside the base unit that will always be charged. The pendant will notify her when the battery is getting low, and when it does that, she just swaps the two batteries, putting the spent battery in the base unit to charge, and moving the charged battery from the base unit to the pendant. We rehearsed it all with her and she was able to do it no problem.Note that this unit DOES require you to have a home phone (not a cell phone) for it to tap into. In a sense, it acts as a "smart cordless phone" on your existing home line. However, my mother DID recently switch from a traditional wired phone to an internet-based voice-over-IP (VOIP) internet-based phone and it works just fine with the VOIP line. So if your loved one has internet and no home phone, you could very inexpensively get them a VOIP phone line to tie this to.Overall we are very satisfied with this unit. It's brought us all a lot of peace of mind. We thoroughly tested it and were able to verify that 911 could see her exact home address when it calls. Mom wears the pendant religiously, even placing it outside the shower on the floor when she showers (we talked through various scenarios such as shower falls, etc.). It's brought us a lot of peace of mind for a modest one-time investement.
