A medical alert device travels with the person wearing it. The address the monitoring centre holds does not travel by itself.
That mismatch is the whole reason this page exists. A cottage two hours north, a farmhouse with the barn across the yard, a winter place in another town, a spare room at a daughter’s house for the three months after a hip replacement: in every one of those cases the pendant or the watch goes along, and the file at the monitoring centre stays exactly as it was until somebody updates it.
Bedford Medical Alert® runs 24/7 monitoring based in Canada, and the operator picking up a call from a cottage road is reading the same file that was written for the house in town. So two things are worth getting right before the first night at a second address: what you can and cannot know about cellular signal there, and how the address on that file actually gets changed.
Two things change, and they have separate fixes.
The first is signal. A mobile device needs cellular service where the person is actually standing. Our own product disclosure carries this on every page of the site, in the footer: “Go Anywhere Pendant medical alert coverage requires available appropriate cellular and GPS signal to work.” We cannot promise you a bar of service at a particular lake, so we do not.
The second is the address on the file. When an alert comes in, the operator is working from a personalized response plan that says who gets called and where help should be sent. If that plan says the house in town while the person is at the cottage, the location is wrong in the one moment it has to be right. GPS on a mobile device helps here, which is much of why mobile devices suit rural properties, though it does not stand in for an accurate address.
What does not change is the subscription. A mobile device that works at the house is the same device that goes in the car, and it arrives configured, with Easy Setup and phone support behind it.
Testing the device at a new location is a good idea and we recommend doing it. Do it when you arrive, while there is still daylight, not on your fourth day up there.
Two things are worth knowing before you buy, and both come with their limits attached.
We offer devices configured to be able to work in places where many single-telephone carrier cellular devices cannot work as well. If someone spends real time somewhere with thin service, that is a fair question to put to us directly. It is not a guarantee about a specific address, and we will not dress it up as one, since signal is a property of the location.
The second point is the useful one. Many of our devices will announce, or show through a change in a status light, that cellular connectivity has gone poor or dropped completely. At a remote property the harder problem is not knowing whether the device is still connected to anyone, and a device that speaks up when it loses its connection gives you something to act on.
If the question underneath all this is about landlines and what happens in a power cut, that is a separate subject with its own page: do you need a landline for a medical alert. This page stays on geography.
Not sure whether a device suits the property you are heading to? Call us at 1-888-755-3055 and describe the place: how far it is from town, and what service is like on a phone up there. We will tell you what we can and cannot promise about it. There is no charge for the conversation and no obligation at the end of it.
Nothing in the system notices a move on its own. The update has to come from a person, and that person is you or your family.
You can reach us through our website, by phone, or by email. Any of the three is fine. What matters is the next part: the request gets closed off with a confirmation of receipt, and we do that confirmation together with you rather than leaving a form to vanish into a queue.
That handshake does more work than it looks like it does. Sending a message and having a record changed are two separate events, and only the second one reaches the operator. Ask for the confirmation, and count the address as updated once you have it in hand.
Three limits, stated plainly, because guessing about any of them would be worse than asking:
This is the detail worth building a small habit around. When you test your button, the Bedford emergency operator confirms the address with you.
So the whole sequence for a household with two properties comes down to this:
Tell us the address has changed. Get the confirmation of receipt. Then press the button and let the operator read the address back to you out loud.
Three steps, and the third one verifies the first two through an actual person on an actual call. A test press carries no charge and no penalty, so there is nothing to weigh up. If you want the fuller picture of what an operator does with a genuine alert, what happens when you press a medical alert button walks through the call from the first second.
We recommend testing. We deliberately do not hand you a schedule, because we have not set one.
A farm poses a different problem from a cottage. The question there is range.
An in-home system works by having a pendant talk to a base station inside the house. The Home Freedom Mini Pendant is listed at 800 feet of range from its base, which covers a house and a tidy yard, and reaches nowhere near the far fence line. Anyone who spends the day beyond the reach of a base station wants a mobile device carrying its own cellular connection and GPS instead of a base at all. The Home Freedom and Go Anywhere comparison puts the two options side by side, including what each one gives up.
For a picture of what mobile monitoring looks like on a working property, we have a piece on our blog set on a farm outside Brandon, Manitoba: independent on the farm.
One product fact belongs here, because a border-country cottage raises it. Bedford devices are not for use in the United States. They are designed to work near the border, and near-border use is not a limitation.
A short recap, in the order the steps happen:
The whole sequence is one message and one button press, and it decides whether the address on file is where the person is or where they used to be.
If the property is beyond the reach of an in-home base, a mobile device with GPS is the right starting point. See what the Go Anywhere systems cover, or call 1-888-755-3055 and tell us about both addresses. Equipment is included with the subscription, and there are no cancellation fees.
