Medical Alert & Senior Safety Blog | Bedford Canada

Families ask this one early, usually right after "does she need a cell phone?" and right before "what if the power goes out?" The short answer is no. The monitored devices Bedford Medical Alert supplies call for help over a telephone line or a cellular network. None of them needs home internet or Wi-Fi to reach an operator.

When a family sets up monitoring with us, the conversation is almost always with the adult children. They give us the address, the contact numbers, the notes about which door sticks and where the spare key lives. Somewhere in that house there is often a fifteen year old who set up the tablet, fixed the Wi-Fi twice, and knows the passcode. Nobody thinks to ask what that person could do.

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.