Medical alarm

A medical alarm is an alarm system designed to signal the presence of a hazard requiring urgent attention and to summon emergency medical personnel. Other terms for a medical alarm are Personal Emergency Response System (PERS) or medical alert.

Typical systems have a wireless pendant or transmitter that can be activated in an emergency. When the medical alarm is activated, the signal is transmitted to an alarm monitoring company's central station, other emergency agency or other programmed phone numbers. Medical personnel are then dispatched to the site where the alarm was activated.

Elderly people and disabled people who live alone commonly use/require medical alarms.

Home alert systems were conceived and developed in Germany in the early 1970s by Wilhelm Hormann with the aim of developing new comprehensive structures for ambulatory and non-ambulatory care for the sick, the elderly, those who live alone, and people with disabilities.

Hormann's concept of "home alert" (Hausnotruf) is thus to be seen as fairly broad, including the communication of biomedical data and social communication, and not limited to use as an "elder alarm". This has been set forth extensively in the research literature on PERS.

The technical implementation succeeded with the help of AEG-Telefunken Backnang GmbH and was presented to the international public early in 1980. In 1982 the Hausnotruf PERS system was distinguished with the Frankfurt Innovation Prize of the German Economy by the Wirtschaftsclub Rhein Main e.V. (Rhein-Main Business Club) in Frankfurt-am-Main.

In 1975 American International Telephone Company offered an emergency home phone system similar to Hormann's. The user wore a medallion around the neck that when pushed delivered a preprogrammed message to several phone numbers.

There are several different types of medical alarm providers:

There are a number of different devices that can be used to trigger an alarm.

Active devices require the user to take some action to trigger an alarm condition; passive systems monitor the user and raise an alarm based on an algorithm - a fall, lack of activity, etc. A weakness of active devices is that the user must be conscious to trigger the alarm. Both passive and active devices require that the user wear the device. Installed systems can be expensive and difficult to deploy.

A medical alarm system may consist of

In addition there are various other types of accessories (emergency buttons, fall sensors, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, flood detectors, motion detectors) that can be placed around the home and integrated with the base station.

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