Vital-Link is of the belief that Fall Detection technology has improved drastically since it first crept into the PERS (Personal Emergency Response Systems) industry a few years back.  There are two key aspects of fall detectors, and finding an equilibrium between the two remains a primary goal of the developers of these medical alert devices.  These two aspects are, false activations (detector too sensitive) and/versus the missing of a fall (detector not sensitive enough to pick up a soft, slumping fall).

We at Vital-Link are of the opinion (please note this is only anecdotal and we do not have studies to support this claim) that the fall detection technology is further along in the mobile PERS industry than in the traditional in-home medical alert system.  Vital-Link has found these systems to have found a greater balance between too sensitive and not sensitive enough than their in-home medical alert system counterparts.

There is an extremely fine line when it comes to the sensitivity of fall detectors.  You don’t want a fall detector that will go off every time the user takes a deep breath, but at the same time you don’t want a fall detector that will only detect the most violent, hard falls.

Different customers have different preferences in regards to the sensitivity of their fall detection buttons.  We received a phone call today from a new subscriber in the Midwest.  Over the weekend his new mobile device “falsely” detected two falls; one time because he dropped it, and the other time because he was swatting flies with a broom.  He wasn’t upset at all by the accidental activations.  He looked at it as a good sign that the system “worked”. Another customer could easily be annoyed by the frequent false activations.  Despite there not being a fool proof solution to the sensitivity issue in fall detection, our goal is to find the tightest equilibrium possible

We believe that the newest technology in fall detection, particularly in the field a mobile PERS, is the closest the industry has seen to a healthy equilibrium.  Over time, technology will continue to improve.  Features such as GPS geo-location will become increasingly more accurate and most notably, fall detection will hopefully become as reliable as it was always intended to be.

For more information about medical alert systems, fall detection technology, and/or mobile alert devices please give us a call at 1-800-338-4825 or fill out the form below.  Thank you for considering Vital-Link!

 

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