Most of the calls we take start after a scare. A fall in the hallway, a hospital discharge, a daughter in another province who could not reach her father for two days. In those conversations families often say some version of the same thing: everything about getting old in this country is getting worse.
In 2018 the US Preventive Services Task Force told clinicians not to use vitamin D supplements to prevent falls in adults over 65. In its update of 4 June 2024 the Task Force removed the question from the falls guideline altogether, and the review meant to settle it is still listed as in progress.
There is a question that almost never comes up first. It arrives near the end of a call, usually from the person who will actually wear the device rather than the adult child arranging it, and it is nearly always phrased as an apology.
The help button is the part of a medical alert system people picture first and ask about last. The calls we take almost never open with a question about how the signal travels. They open with something practical. Will it fit under a cardigan sleeve. Will it survive a shower. Can Dad wear it if he already has a watch on that wrist and refuses to give up the wrist.
The calls we take about stopping a medical alert service are almost never complaints. Here is how cancelling works in Canada: no long-term contracts, no cancellation fees, and the equipment goes back with a prepaid label.
A good share of the calls that reach our office begin with an adult child, not the person who will wear the pendant. The safety conversation has usually happened; the money conversation has not.
When families call about an emergency necklace, the questions are usually about range, water, and battery. The one that decides whether it works is whether the pendant is still being worn months later.
Adult children call us with the same worry most weeks: my parent needs a bit of help, and my parent will not hear of it. How to read the early signs of self-neglect with respect, and what a family can actually do when the person they are worried about is a competent adult who has said no.
By late June, the sky over much of Canada can turn the colour of weak tea. Wildfire smoke drifts hundreds of kilometres from the fires that make it, and the air outside a home in Toronto or Kelowna can carry a health warning even when there is no flame in sight.
Can a smart speaker replace a monitored medical alert? What Alexa does well for a senior, where its emergency features stop in Canada, and what a monitored system adds.
