Health IT

Panic buttons are ancient technology. So why are they still so popular for seniors?

Now I’m starting to appreciate how clinical researchers feel. It’s long been said that it […]

Now I’m starting to appreciate how clinical researchers feel.

It’s long been said that it takes as long as 17 years for new medical knowledge to find its way into routine clinical practice. Resistance to change, doubt about the findings and staunch defense of the status quo (“But we’ve always done it this way”) usually are to blame.

It’s been less than 2½ years since, writing for another publication, I called for passive personal emergency response systems to become standard in eldercare, rather than the ancient technology of the pendant-worn panic button. Not only is the old way still entrenched, it seems to be gaining steam.

Maybe it’s my bad habit of watching late-night TV, but it seems like I’m seeing more commercials for Life Alert these days than I was back at the end of 2012.

Life Alert Emergency Response holds the trademark for the phrase, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” If you lived through the late 1980s or early 1990s, you remember how that catchphrase became a punch line, thanks to the commercials of previous trademark holder LifeCall.

The campiness of those early ads has given way to a serious tone in more recent ads like this one, perhaps reflecting the fact that more and more seniors are choosing to stay active and as independent as possible. Life Alert now claims that it “saves a life from catastrophe every 10 minutes.”

That may be so, and that’s a good thing, but what’s not said is that “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” dates to 1989. Life Call, which reportedly lost the trademark in 1999, has been around since 1974. I traced Life Alert back to about 1987.

In other words, the manually operated panic button is more than 40 years old. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” has been used to sell this outdated technology for a quarter century.

While Life Call and others are now making “passive” PERS that automatically detect falls to summon help even if the wearer is incapacitated, the Life Alert ads still show the manual button. Because of this, millions of people must think this is the gold standard in keeping tabs on frail elderly relatives, whether in their own homes, senior residences, assisted-living facilities or nursing homes. It’s not, as anyone with even an inkling of knowledge of the wireless health industry in 2015 knows.

Unfortunately, as I detailed in that 2012 commentary, my 93-year-old grandmother had one of the old-school panic buttons — wirelessly tied to a cordless landline phone of early ’90s vintage — in the senior apartment she had moved into just a couple of months earlier, and not because she was old-school. It was because building management thought would be adequate for its residents.

Clearly, it was not. My grandmother had been showing increasing signs of dementia in her last year of life. She fell and hit her head. There was no way she could push a button, so she lay on her couch, bleeding onto her brain, overnight, perhaps as long as eight hours before someone checked on her. She died three weeks later.

Think of how often Life Alert could save a life from a catastrophe if it were advertising a passive PERS. Yes, automatic fall detection isn’t perfect, but wouldn’t you rather have a false positive than no response at all?

More than two years later, I repeat my call to make passive PERS the standard of care in senior monitoring. Given how long it takes for serious change in healthcare, I just hope the panic buttons are relegated to history before I’m in my golden years.

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