A medical alert setup is usually uneventful. The equipment comes with the subscription, it gets placed where the person actually spends their day, the personalized response plan gets written down, and that is the whole job.
Then there are the households where the standard setup does not fit. The base unit answers from the hallway and nobody hears it. A help button that is easy to see can still be impossible to feel.
Bedford Medical Alert® brings three generations of experience to Canadian homes. Four mismatches come up in the fit conversation: hearing, vision, hand strength, and memory. This page sets out what we can change for each one and what we will not promise.
The four break down cleanly. Two are about how the device talks to the person. One is about how the person talks to the device. The fourth is about who else needs to be able to help.
They also combine, and that is the case worth naming, because it is the one a product page never covers. Reduced hearing alongside stiff hands is an entirely realistic pairing, and treating each condition separately gives the wrong answer twice. Someone who cannot hear the base unit confirm and cannot press firmly needs both halves solved at once, which is what the setup call is for.
Each one is worth raising before anything ships. None of them is unusual, and none of them is a reason the equipment will not work.
Statistics Canada measured hearing instead of asking about it. In the Canadian Health Measures Survey cycles covering 2012 to 2015, 77.6% of adults aged 60 to 79 had at least slight measured hearing loss in one or both ears.
A second figure from the same 2012 to 2015 survey is the useful one for fitting equipment. Among Canadians aged 60 to 79 with measured hearing loss, Statistics Canada found that 73.2% had never been diagnosed with a hearing problem by a health professional. Undiagnosed is not the same as unaware, and we will not stretch it into that. What it does mean is that hearing can be a factor in a household where nobody has named it, and that it may surface after the equipment is in place, when the base unit answers and nobody responds.
Two things can change on a Bedford device. Loud volume settings are available, which handles the straightforward half. Indicator status lights are available on our devices as well, so equipment status can be read with the eyes instead of heard. Someone who misses a chime can still look.
Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey on Disability found that 11.4% of Canadians aged 65 and over had a seeing disability in 2022.
For that household the channels swap. Audible status announcements are available, so equipment status arrives as speech. Help buttons designed to be easy to feel matter here too, and that is a specific property: the button has to be findable by touch, in the dark, without looking down.
Put the hearing and vision answers side by side and the same status information travels two ways, once visually and once audibly. Before you order, the useful question is which of those two channels the person in the house actually relies on.
Not sure which of these applies in your household? Call 1-888-755-3055 and say so plainly on the call. Bedford operators follow a personalized response plan built around the conditions in the home, and the fit questions belong in that conversation. The consultation by phone is complimentary and carries no obligation.
In 2023, 46.0% of Canadians aged 65 and older reported having arthritis, according to Statistics Canada’s Canadian Community Health Survey. The same Statistics Canada report notes, citing published research, that arthritis is associated with mobility limitations and dependency in activities of daily living. That is the clinical way of describing what a stiff hand means for a help button.
Bedford has buttons for those with more advanced arthritis. They are easier to trigger. That is the accommodation, stated the way it was confirmed to us.
Now the limit. We do not publish a trigger force, and we will not promise that one button suits every degree of arthritis. Arthritis covers a wide range of severity. Tell us on the setup call how the hands are when they are at their worst, and we will match equipment to that.
For memory change the accommodation is device simplicity, paired with a way for family to be useful without hovering.
Simple equipment is the first half: fewer states to remember, less to interpret. The second half is the Bedford Medical Alert app, free to download on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. Family members and designated caregivers can check location on demand, see device status and battery level, and receive alerts and notifications. Battery level is the quietly valuable one, because it moves a recurring question off the senior and onto whoever is checking the app.
The app also holds a Senior Profile: allergies, directives, medical conditions, prescriptions, doctors, pharmacies, familiar places, and designated caregivers, all in one place.
One framing note, and we hold to it. Location on demand is family reassurance that the person has agreed to, not monitoring done to them. A senior who has not agreed to it should not have it switched on, and that conversation belongs before the app is set up. If memory change is the reason you are here, living alone with dementia covers the wider picture, and this page will not restate it.
The fit conversation works better if you arrive with specifics.
Not every accessibility question is answered by adjusting a wearable. If pressing a button is unreliable in the first place, the options move elsewhere.
Silver Shield uses non-wearable millimetre-wave radar, so there is nothing to wear or press. One distinction matters here: Silver Shield is not monitored by Bedford staff. It alerts family and caregivers automatically according to protocols the family sets. Where fall detection is part of the conversation, the general point stands regardless of brand: no sensor on the market catches every fall, and we will not tell you otherwise.
If you want to see the whole range against your own situation, the device assessment walks through it in a few questions. And if the underlying worry is what actually happens after the button goes in, what happens when you press the button answers that end of it.
Bedford is a member of the Ontario Community Support Association, is trusted by clinicians across Canada, and has supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health. None of that makes a device fit a particular pair of hands. The setup call does.
Tell us what does not fit and we will tell you honestly whether we can accommodate it. See what is included with Home Freedom in-home systems, or call 1-888-755-3055 and describe the household. No long-term contracts, and no cancellation fees.
