Personal alarms for seniors: how to choose one in Australia

What a personal alarm actually does

Strip the marketing away and a personal alarm does three things. It gives the wearer one button they can find without looking. When that button is held, it rings people. And it tells those people where the wearer is.

With SOS Everywhere the wearer holds the button for two seconds. The pendant rings the first person on the list. We set it to ring each contact for 15 seconds, then move to the next, and to go round the list up to five times before it stops. Whoever answers can talk to the wearer through the pendant, and anyone on the list with texts switched on gets a message that starts with the name you gave the device. The SOS Everywhere app shows where the pendant is on a map, with the street address and the battery level, and during an alarm it reports its position every 10 seconds for 10 minutes.

That is the whole product. A watch version, the SOS Everywhere Watch, does the same with the button under its screen. The pendant and the watch are not medical devices, and we print that rather than hint at it.

Home unit or mobile pendant

The first decision is not the brand. It is whether the alarm has to leave the house.

A home unit is a base station that sits near the phone or a power point, with a small pendant that talks to it. It works well for someone who is mostly at home and whose falls happen in the bathroom or the kitchen. It stops at the letterbox. Press the pendant at the shops, in the car park or two streets away on a walk, and nothing happens.

A mobile pendant has its own SIM. It is the phone. It works in the house and in the garden, at the bowls club and on the bus, because it connects to the mobile network directly. SOS Everywhere is a mobile alarm on a SIM that uses Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. Works on any Australian mobile network, everywhere there's mobile coverage. There is no base station and nothing to plug in but the charging cable.

The trade-off is charging. A home pendant can sit on its base for months. A mobile pendant is charged on a magnetic cable, and the family sees the battery level in the app, with a text to the contacts at 25 per cent and a spoken warning from the pendant at 10 per cent. If the wearer goes out alone at all, choose mobile. If they never leave the house and will not manage a charging routine, a home unit is an honest answer, and it is not what we sell.

Who answers: family, a monitoring centre, or both

Australian alarms come in two families. Monitored services ring a call centre, and the operator decides who to send. Family alarms ring the people you choose. Each has a case.

A monitoring centre is right when nobody on the list can be relied on to answer. If the wearer's family is overseas, works nights or simply does not pick up unknown numbers, a centre that answers every time is the safer choice. Monitored services usually charge by the month for that.

A family alarm is right when the people who know the wearer are close and will answer. The person who picks up knows the address, the neighbour with the key and the GP's name, and they see the map. There is no operator working from a file.

SOS Everywhere is a family alarm first, with monitoring as an add-on rather than a monthly fee. The list is rung in order, and if you add 24/7 monitoring, our monitoring provider takes the call when none of your contacts answer. That covers the hours the family is asleep or driving without changing how the alarm behaves the rest of the time. Monitored or unmonitored is worth a page of its own, and it is in the queue. The short version is that the list should always be tried first, and the centre should be there for when the list fails.

Fall detection, and what it can't do

Most mobile alarms now include a fall detector, and most sellers oversell it. The sensor in the pendant looks for a hard fall: the sudden drop, the impact, the stillness afterwards. When it sees one, SOS Everywhere raises the alarm itself and can ring the contact list without the button being pressed. In the app, you set how sensitive it is, from 1 to 9.

What it cannot do is catch a slow slide down a wall, a slump into a chair, or a fall broken by an outstretched hand. No fall detector catches every fall. Treat it as a backstop that sometimes rings when the wearer cannot, and treat the button as the plan. The full explanation, including how to choose a sensitivity and what the family sees when a fall alarm arrives, is in our fall detection guide.

The questions that decide it

Sit at the kitchen table with the wearer and answer these. Each one rules something in or out.

• Do they go out alone? To the shops, on a walk, to the club. Yes means a mobile alarm, not a home unit.
• Do they wear a watch? Someone who has worn one for 60 years will keep wearing one. Someone who never has will take it off. The pendant suits the second person; the watch suits the first.
• Do they shower alone? The pendant is rated IP67, so it stays on in the shower and in the rain. Take it off to swim.
• Who is on the list, and will they answer? Write the names down in order. A neighbour makes a good third. If you cannot name three people who will pick up, add 24/7 monitoring.
• Can they find a button without looking? A pendant has one big round button and no screen. A watch has one wide button under the screen. If a phone's lock screen defeats them, so will a smartwatch.
• Is there a mobile signal at the house? Check the address on the three carriers' maps, including indoors. A mobile alarm is only as good as the signal.

If the answers are out alone, no watch, showers alone, three good names and coverage at home, the pendant without monitoring is the usual result. Change any one of them and the tree in the figure moves.

What it costs over three years

Personal alarms are priced three ways in Australia. Some are bought outright with a yearly renewal. Some are supplied for a small amount with a monthly fee. Some are bought and then charged monthly. The only fair comparison is over three years, because the first-year price hides the rest.

SOS Everywhere is the first kind. The pendant or watch is $487, and that includes 12 months of SIM service with unlimited alarm calls and alarm texts. With 24/7 monitoring for the same 12 months it is $527. From year two the renewal is $69 a year, or $109 a year with monitoring, paid once a year with no monthly fee. There is no installation charge, no call charges and no lock-in beyond the 12-month term. Shipping is free and the pendant arrives set up, SIM in, with the app login ready.

A monthly monitored service will usually cost less in the first month and more by the end of the first year, and the gap widens every year after that. When you compare, write down year one, year two and year three for each option before you look at anything else. Our page on LiveLife's prices beside ours does that arithmetic with their figures and the date we checked them.

Funding before you pay

Do not pay privately before you have asked whether a scheme the wearer is already in will cover it. The scheme decides, and the answer is often yes.

If the wearer has a Support at Home plan, the provider can buy a personal alarm from the plan's assistive technology funding. A recommendation from an occupational therapist speeds it up, and we send the provider the quote and the invoice in the shape they need. Unspent Home Care Package funds that carried into Support at Home can be used the same way.

If there is no plan yet, a My Aged Care assessment is the first step. It can open the Commonwealth Home Support Programme, where equipment is requested through Indigo's geat2GO platform by an occupational therapist, physiotherapist or aged care assessor.

If the wearer has an NDIS plan, a personal alarm under $1,500 is low-cost assistive technology: no quote and no assessment. In New South Wales, EnableNSW funds one non-monitored mobile alarm requested by a registered occupational therapist. Veterans go through DVA's contracted suppliers, and we are not one yet.

None of this changes the device. It changes who pays and what paperwork we send, which is why the order form asks about funding before it asks for a card.

A short way to decide

If you are still unsure, use the wearer's habits rather than the spec sheet. The alarm that stays on the body wins. The list that gets answered wins. Coverage at the house is not negotiable. Then, and only then, compare prices over three years, and ask the scheme before you pay.