Cooperative Response Center, Inc. (CRC) announces it has recently partnered with Better Alerts in West Conshohocken, Penn., to monitor its mobile personal emergency response systems (mPERS).
Milwaukee, WI, August 26, 2015 --(PR.com)-- With the push of a button or a simple voice-command, seniors can now extend their ability to live independently by 2-5-10 years with a new device called “The Q Watch.”
What’s new with PERS? For several years now pseudo-statistics have been floating about the long-standing PERS market – asking the same question over and over hasn’t changed the paraphrased answer: 'The market is approximately $1.5 billion in the US and changes very slowly. Is it true that only 10% of the purchased devices are mobile – that is usable away from the home? Insiders today say that 20% of the sales are for mobile devices. So what else is apparent and new with the PERS space in the past four months -- from the companies own material:
BOCA RATON, Fla.—ADT has added a wearable, mobile PERS device to its health product portfolio.
The On-The-Go Emergency Response System allows seniors, along with younger folks—hikers and runners, for example—to contact specially trained monitoring personnel in the event they take a tumble or a more life-threatening fall. What’s new for ADT is that this GPS-enabled device worn as a necklace allows for communication and emergency response outside of the clients’ home bases.
PORTLAND, OR -- (Marketwired) -- 07/08/15 -- Consumer Cellular, the mobile carrier with the highest overall customer satisfaction according to Nielsen Mobile Insights, has entered the mobile Personal Emergency Response System (mPERS) market with the launch of the Ally. This marks Consumer Cellular's first mPERS offering and is available through the Consumer Cellular website and customer call centers.
Alexa made me write about voice. We signed up early for this Amazon Echo home control/music library accessed through a Pringle can looking box. True, it needs to be connected to broadband and yes, it needs to be plugged into a wall outlet. But it has no keyboard, only voice input through a lighted-ring of seven microphones listening, continuously learning speech patterns. What to ask this smart-aleck Alexa? Well, it turns out, it can play an amazing ‘shuffle’ of music you may have purchased through Amazon, but if you are an Amazon Prime member ($99/year), it can also play any of a million songs. And it has the ability to set up logic scripts (If This, Then That) – links between wake-up alarms and turning on the lights. Oh, and did you know that to encourage voice-tech adoption, Amazon is also launching a $100 million Alexa Fund?
Carlsbad, CA July 1, 2015 - Nortek Security & Control LLC, a Nortek, Inc. company (Nasdaq: NTK) and a leader in the residential and commercial security and smart control markets, today announced it acquired mobile personal emergency response system (mPERS) and telehealth business assets from privately held Numera, Inc.
SAN DIEGO (April 28, 2015) - GreatCall, the leader in creating mobile health and safety solutions for active aging, today added automatic fall detection to its 5Star urgent response service. As falls are the leading cause of injury among older adults, this technology enables them to go about their lives safely and independently, knowing the device will automatically alert a highly trained 5Star agent in the event of a fall.
These are tech transition times for everyone – including seniors and their devices. In case you didn’t see it, the Pew numbers about smartphone use are out – 27% of the 65+ have smartphones, up from 19% last year. Given the date of that data (from last fall), let’s just assume that this number is actually lower than today's reality. So why should a PERS reseller or manufacturer care? First because carriers don’t want to sell feature/clamshell phones any more. They make it difficult to even find them. They are selling smartphones to people who don’t want or use all of the features they have, but they’re buying them anyway because that is what they’re being sold. In retrospect, Philips Lifeline might have seen the near term PERS future – and it could be a smartphone – and thus an app. And thus -- why have more than one device? And why not pair a tiny pendant or clip to a smartphone? Or make a watch?
