Smartwatches as Medic Alert?

The following is from an article by Tech-enhanced Life Newsletter, For the full report and their recommendations go here. 

For years we have been hearing older adults complain about how ugly and stigmatizing medical alerts are. As one lady told us: "My medical alert button makes me look like I escaped from the Intensive Care Unit. So I hardly ever wear it".

Could these products change this dynamic?

In 2018 a handful of products came to market that looks like smartwatches, and in some cases have some or all of the functionality of stylish smartwatches — but also work as medical alert devices. 

We wanted to see how well they worked and set out to test them. In particular, we hoped they might seem more palatable for daily wear than conventional medical alerts.

Here are the results of our hands-on, comparative evaluation.

Summary and Key Takeaways

We did comparative evaluations (including extensive hands-on testing) of four different products, each representing a somewhat different vision of what a "smartwatch as medical alert" should be. 

While all worked quite well as medical alerts, none was perfect. And in terms of smartwatch functionality, they ranged from "every smartwatch feature you could imagine" (the Apple Watch) to "a rather minimal smartwatch functionality" (Freedom Guardian).

Our evaluation made it clear that these products are quite different from each other, with fairly profound differences. We think these differences are best thought of as feature sets that make each one suitable for a specific persona. So while there is no "best" product in this group, there is very definitely a "best product for a specific person".

In the Recommendations section, we explain which types of people are best suited for each product, and lay out how we would choose which of these might be right for you, or for a specific person for whom you might be shopping.

Finally, while we think many people will like these products, they are not for everyone. For some specific personas, we think people would be best served by sticking with a more conventional type of medical alert. In the Recommendations section, we also describe the type of person who might better stick with a conventional medical alert.