You've Fallen and Can't Get Up? Can I Have Your Apartment?

Oh, dear. Are we at the Life Alert stage already?

Do you remember those Life Alert, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” commercials? They were very big in the early ‘90s, zooming in on an older woman on the floor, who had a voice like your most annoying relative: Insistent, accusatory, grating:

“Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. And your cousin Evelyn? She never returned my Pyrex dishes. Not that I’m complaining. But every Thanksgiving she traipses off with another one and she has yet to bring one back. And those dishes are not cheap. Heeelp!!”

My first impulse, hearing this woman, was to let her lay there, then go after her apartment. Of course, that ad first appeared when I was forty-one, callow and hard. Now that I am a seventy-something babe, aware that you can break when you fall, I am more sensitive to her plight. Medical alerts are a subject that’s been coming up a lot.

My best friend Herb, who is 83 and has Parkinson’s, just got a Life Alert alarm.  It’s not one item, it’s adopting a family: There’s the main transmission unit, which Herb keeps in the bedroom; a waterproof button in the bathroom, which is Ground Zero for at-home accidents; and an at-home alert medallion Herb wears around his neck like a mezuzah – Help me, Almighty Emergency Dispatch, for it is You and You alone with the power to send an ambulance. There is also a transmitter/GPS the size of a playing card which Herb carries when he goes out and which, it is claimed, will work anywhere in the U.S. there is a cell system. This suggests to me it is Spectrum/Verizon dependent which gives me great peace of mind.

 The setup also requires providing contacts to notify, which can be difficult.

“Hey, Jack, I got this alarm that notifies people when I fall and I was wondering if I could put you down as one of my contacts?”

Silence.

“You know, in case I couldn’t get up? And I was lying on the floor in pain, looking at a slow, agonizing death?”

“Yeah, well, I’d love to, but you know, I’m teaching this semester. And I’m back and forth between here and the country place and then there’s my back. I’m probably looking at surgery.”

Long pause.

 “I could maybe do Mondays.”

These medical alert systems are not cheap. Herb’s costs $110 a month, in addition to a $248 upfront fee. So I was delighted, when visiting an old college roommate, to learn that Alexa, a beloved, if avaricious, member of many American households, including my own, has an emergency alert system which is much less expensive.

It costs $7.99 a month, my friend told me, and in addition to calling emergency services people and providing information like building access codes and whether you have a dog which will bite them, it will also call personal contacts. I was so excited about this, I asked my Alexa about it when I got home.

Alexa, I said, I hear you will call for help if I fall and can’t get up.

Sorry, I’m not sure.

Alexa, tell me about your ability to call for help if I fall and can’t get up.

When you set up your Alexa device, you’ll be able to receive calls from contacts stored in the Alexa app, complete with both audible and visual alerts to notify you of incoming calls.

Alexa, in case I fall and injure myself, can I ask you to call for help?

I can’t place this call. If this is a life-threatening situation, please call emergency services directly from a phone.

This conversation, if we can call an interaction with A.I. a conversation, reminded me of the emergency alert system my late mother Milly used when she was in her late eighties.

My mother had a terrific circle of girlfriends, a sort of Golden Girls gang, in her Daytona Beach condo. Every morning the ladies, who were my mother’s age and older, would check in with one another to make sure they were still upright and breathing. One morning, during one of these calls, my mother dropped the phone.  The friend she was speaking with assumed she had just hung up and mentioned it to no one. In fact, my mother had had a major stroke and had fallen to the floor, where she remained, semi-conscious, for eight hours until a condo handyman realized he hadn’t seen her and went to her apartment to check.

The Alexa Emergency Alert link, courtesy of my good friend Google.

You’re welcome.