Medical Alert Update: 2024
Some interesting improved medical alert products are now on the market
Since we first started evaluating medical alert products back in 2015, the field has generally been rather slow moving, with little changing from year to year. However, in 2023 there were some notable developments, and this post is to summarize both what is new, and how it fits into the overall context of the medical alert field.
Some of you already know a lot about medical alerts. For those people, please focus on the “New Developments” section. For those who have not spent much time in the past learning about medical alerts and what differentiates one from the other, we summarize where to learn the basics in the paragraph below, pointing you to various articles and talks on the Tech-enhanced Life website including a tutorial talk by Dr. Caro.
Medical Alerts: How to Learn the Basics
As part of a seminar series in 2022, Richard Caro gave a talk entitled “Medical Alert Systems: How to Choose”.
If you are new to this topic, that talk is the place to start. You can find it at the link below. You can also find there a simple written tutorial defining some of the key features and terms.
Listen to the talk and read the tutorial: About Medical Alert Systems: Learning Module.
The tutorial covers some of the key points — such as the difference between “at home” systems; “on the go / mobile” systems, and “smartwatches as medical alerts”.
New Developments for 2024
Improved Smartwatch Medical Alert Choices
Among the Longevity Explorers who want a medical alert, an increasingly popular option is a smartwatch that looks stylish, has useful smartwatch features, and also functions as a medical alert.
Apple pioneered this concept some time ago, but in the years since, a number of other smartwatch medical alerts came to the market.
Prior to 2023, most of these products had some, but not all, of the features we thought were “ideal”. So picking a product involved making some tradeoffs. As of this post (January 2024), the product offerings have improved in some important ways, and so there are several excellent possible choices for people who want a medical alert that also functions as a smartwatch.
Simplified Smartwatch Alert Category
While we are big fans of full featured smartwatches like an Apple Watch, there is a subgroup of consumers who find them a bit too complicated, with confusing interfaces and too many available apps. For that group of people, we recommend either a conventional medical alert or one of the category of “simplified smartwatches”.
The simplified smartwatches look contemporary, and have some smartwatch features, but are far less complex to operate than a full featured smartwatch, typically involving simplified interfaces and far less capabilities. For an introduction to this topic, see “Smartwatch as Medical Alert”.
Fall Detection Capabilities
In our opinion, one of the biggest changes for 2024 is that several of the “simple smartwatches” have now added fall detection algorithms to the feature set.
In our opinion, one of the biggest changes for 2024 is that several of the “simple smartwatches” have now added fall detection algorithms to the feature set.
Specific products that have done that include the following products.
Theora Care’s Theora Connect product is available from Bay Alarm Medical as the SOS Smartwatch. The product is now available with fall detection (previously it did not have that capability). Read Review: Bay Alarm SOS Smartwatch.
Medical Guardian has a smartwatch medical alert (MGMove), which also includes fall detection as an option. Based on its appearance, we suspect this product is also based on the Theora Care product (ie the same as the product offered by Bay Alarm Medical). However, we have not confirmed that. If you know for sure, please tell us in the comments.
Theora Care itself sells the underlying product on which both of the above are based, and markets it as the Theora Connect. This now comes with fall detection too, and has a nice caregiving app. This version of the product behaves differently in an emergency compared to most other smart watch medical alerts (including the two above, based on the same hardware). When an emergency is detected, this product messages the caregivers in the network you set up, instead of calling a professional call center responder as do the other products discussed here. This is potentially an important detail. Read Review: Theora Connect.
HandsFree Health includes a new smartwatch medical alert that contains fall detection. Read Review: HandsFree Health WellBe Medical Alert Watch
Unaliwear’s Kanega Watch has had fall detection for several years now. Read Review: Kanega Watch.
LifeFone now also has a smartwatch that has fall detection (the “At-Home & On-the-Go Safe Watch Active”). We have not reviewed it and are uncertain which product it is based on (it looks to be the same product as the round WellBe Watch offered by HandsFree Health, but we have not confirmed that). If you know anything about it, please tell us in the comments.
Apple Watch continues to have fall detection capability of course. See further down for an entire section on the Apple Watch.
Note that several of these vendors claim they have a particularly good or sophisticated fall detection algorithm. We are always interested in seeing the data to support such claims, but so far none of the vendors has been willing to share such data. We do not currently feel able to comment on whether one fall detection algorithm is better than another.
Caregiver Apps
An important feature for some people is an accompanying “caregiver app”, which enables a family caregiver or friend to “observe” where the watch wearer is, and communicate with them, and keep an eye on things like whether or not the watch is charged.
In the past, none of the simplified smartwatch medical alerts had this caregiver app feature, but as of Jan 2024, the following smartwatch medical alert products have the caregiver app.
Medical Guardian MGMove.
Theora Care Theora Connect.
The following products do NOT have the caregiver app, as of Dec. 2023 (as best we can tell from the marketing material): Bay Alarm SOS Smartwatch; Unaliwear Kanega Watch; LifeFone Smartwatch. We are unsure about the HandsFree Health WellBe Watch.
Additional Smartwatch Features
In the past, the simplified smartwatches had rather limited smartwatch features, often being limited to say the time, and weather, and maybe step counting.
During 2023, several of the products added some useful “smartwatch features”. For example:
Bay Alarm SOS Smartwatch now includes time, step tracker, weather?, fall detection.
Medical Guardian MGMove Watch now includes time, step counting, messages and reminders, weather, fall detection. AND a caregiving app.
Theora Connect now includes time, step counting, messages and reminders, weather, fall detection. AND a caregiving app. But, in emergency it messages caregivers, rather than calling a call center professional responder as do the other products. [This is a plus for some people and a minus for some others].
Unaliwear Kanega Watch includes time, unusual battery configuration that means you don’t need to remove it to charge, voice activation, medication reminders, fall detection.
HandsFree Health WellBe Watch (round version) now includes time, heart rate monitor, step counting, fall detection.
LifeFone Smartwatch now includes heart rate monitor, step counting, weather, fall detection. We think this product uses the same basic watch hardware as the HandsFree product but have not confirmed that.
Full-featured smartwatches
The Apple Watch, and the Google Pixel Watch, and the Samsung Galaxy Watch all come with a built-in capability of detecting a fall, and contacting someone for help.
We have evaluated the Apple Watch a LOT. We have not tried out the Google product, or the most recent Samsung product (we tried an older model and liked it). If you have tried them, please share your experiences in the comments.
Apple Watch Keeps Getting Better
The latest Apple Watches come with many useful features (see future posts for more exploration of this product).
As it relates to its function as a medical alert, the main development is that there is now an additional “medical alert app” you can add to the watch for some additional capability if you need it, as explained below.
The basic Apple Watch works well to detect falls and summon help, but differs from most medical alerts in that, when it calls for help, it dials directly to 911 (the Emergency Services). In contrast, a traditional medical alert (and the simplified smartwatches mentioned above) dial a call center staffed specifically to answer this type of call.
The call center acts to triage the call, and asks “Mrs Smith” if she is OK, and only if necessary calls the emergency services 911.
There are pluses and minuses to both of these approaches (see Dr. Caro’s talk for a longer discussion). But the key point is that for those who want the Apple smartwatch features, but want the call for help to go to a call center rather than to 911, this can easily be accomplished by adding an “App” to the Apple Watch.
For a number of years this has been possible using an App called FallCall Lite.
There is now an additional option, which is to download a different app, called the Lively App. This comes from a long established player in the medical alert field, originally called GreatCall, then rebranded as Lively, and currently owned by Best Buy.
See FallCall Review
To learn about the Lively App on the Apple Watch, see it on the Lively (Best Buy) website.
NOTE: we have not tried the Lively App in its current form. However, when we tried previous Lively medical alert products and apps, they were generally good, so we suspect this would be worth a try if you want to add a medical alert app to your Apple Watch. [Best Buy charges a monthly fee to use the Lively app.]
Conventional Medical Alerts: Not Much Change
Outside the smartwatch category, there are two main types of medical alert. We call these two categories:
“at home” medical alerts; and
“mobile” or “out-and-about” medical alerts.
Very little has changed in either of these categories, other than a refreshing of some of the products’ appearances, and a general slow progress to smaller products, with updated network capability (eg using 4G vs previously 3G).
We no longer try and do individual reviews of these mobile and at-home products. But if you are interested in these types of medical alert, a good place to start your research is on the websites of the two vendors Medical Guardian, and Bay Alarm Medical — both of which typically carry fairly up to date examples of these types of medical alert.
NOTE: One thing that is often confusing is that the vendors typically do not make their own alerts, but instead purchase them from OEM manufacturers. So, it is common to find the same exact product for sale from different medical alert vendors, but with quite different names.
As an example, one of the smallest and lightest mobile medical alerts we have seen (as of Dec 2023) is a product originally for OEM sale by Freeus as the “Belle X”, and available from Medical Guardian as the “MGMiniLite”. We suspect it will be (may be already is) available from other vendors too in due course.
We evaluated this product, and in our opinion it is a good choice if you just want a simple conventional mobile medical alert, and really care about size and weight.
Martha Stewart Makes Some Waves
One new market entrant in 2023 was a medical alert bracelet, called the Silvertree Reach (sold by Silvertree).
This company has enrolled celebrity Martha Stewart to help publicize the product, and it has featured on various media sites.
We have not done a hands-on evaluation, but when we check out its features, here are the key points:
It fits into our category of “mobile alerts”: designed to go anywhere.
It is trying hard to be “stylish and elegant”. The pictures look OK. One would need to see it in the flesh to decide.
It is a simple wrist band with a built in button.
It does not have any smartwatch features. For example, you can’t tell the time.
Battery life is quite long: 10 days.
It does have fall detection, which is good.
It does NOT have a microphone or speaker in it. This is in our opinion a significant limitation. It means that when the algorithm detects a fall, it is unclear how it communicates with you to be sure the fall is real. This would need some looking in to, to be sure they have thought this aspect through.
Disclosures and Notes
We do not get paid to review these products or to write about them.
The Tech-enhanced Life website does include some affiliate links, so if you end up buying products using those links, Tech-enhanced Life gets a (modest) financial benefit. However there are no such affiliate links in this email / post.
The focus here is on products available for US consumers. There are some other products available in other geographies (e.g. the EU and Asia), but we do not cover them here.
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