Who can forget the commercial when fall alert buttons first came out,where the individual is lying on the floor and yells out “HELP! HELP! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” I do not want to make light of the situation, because being in such a vulnerable situation is awful. I know, because I once dislocated my kneecap when playing with my dog in the front yard. I didn’t have my cell phone, and I was on the only one home at the time, and I had to lie there for a half hour before some stranger walked by who could get me the help I needed.
Many times when an older person lives alone and has started to have some falls, the kids who lives out of state starts trying to get their mom or dad to get a fall alert button. It is hopefully a back up plan that they will never need to use.
When the emergency call buttons first came out, they worked through your phone. Back in the day, this was what we now call your “land line”. It meant that you had to be within 200-300 feet of the phone in order for it to work. You can still get this kind today, but I don’t recommend them. When one patient of mine from Sarasota, Florida, fell in her yard when gardening, she was too far away from the phone for it to work.
These days, there are fall alert devices that work via GPS. That means you could be anywhere, push the button, and they would find you! One of my “snow bird” patients who went back up to Maine for the summer pushed the button just to see if they would answer, and they did!
Another one of my patients fell when stepping off the curb on the way home from the theatre one night. He is a huge 6-foot tall 250 lb man, with an itsy, bitsy wife, and she was not able to help him up. All she had to do was push the button, and the paramedics knew where to find him. She didn’t have to figure out what address she was at, fiddle in her purse to find her cell phone, or risk hurting herself trying to help him up. She just had to push the button that was hanging around his neck.
So the gist of the message is that even fall alert devices are using GPS technology, and you might as well take advantage of good technology that could really save your life. The best way to compare the different plans is to do a Google search for “GPS Fall Alert Buttons”, and check out what comes up.
Painting: The Fall of Icarus- Marc Chagall, 1975.
