If you have started looking into how an older relative could get help at home, you will have met three different kinds of thing quite quickly, all described in similar language, all solving different problems.
It is worth separating them, because buying the wrong one is common and the disappointment tends to arrive at the worst moment. Y.O.D.O. is one of the three, and it is the one that is least like the others, so we will be blunt about what it does not do.
1. Personal alarms
A pendant or wristband with a button. Press it and a monitoring centre answers, usually within seconds, and either talks to the person, calls a nominated contact, or calls an ambulance.
Good for: someone conscious, at home, who can reach the button.
Not good for: anything where the person cannot press it. That includes a stroke, a bad fall away from the base unit, and the very common case of the alarm being left on the bedside table because it feels like a badge.
Roughly: an installation fee and a monthly monitoring charge. Some local councils provide them; it is always worth asking adult social services before buying privately.
2. Telecare and fall detectors
The same monitoring centre, with sensors instead of a button. Automatic fall detection, bed and chair occupancy sensors, door sensors, smoke and flood alarms, sometimes movement sensors that notice an unusual pattern.
Good for: someone who might not be able to press a button, and for household risks like a cooker left on.
Not good for: anyone who resents being monitored, which is more people than the brochures suggest. Fall detection is also imperfect in both directions: it misses some falls and calls a monitoring centre when someone sits down heavily.
Roughly: more than a plain alarm, sometimes provided or subsidised after a needs assessment.
3. Check-in services
No hardware. The person confirms they are fine on a rhythm they set, and if that confirmation does not arrive, the people they chose are told and asked to make contact.
Good for: the enormous middle ground of people who are not frail, do not want sensors in the house, and simply live alone or far from family. It is also the only one of the three that works when nothing dramatic has happened, and the only one that treats being unreachable as information in itself.
Not good for: emergencies. There is no button and no monitoring centre.
This is the category Y.O.D.O. is in.
What Y.O.D.O. is not, in plain words
We would rather lose a sale than have someone buy this expecting the wrong thing.
- It is not a personal alarm. There is no button and no monitoring centre.
- It is not a medical device or a health monitor. It measures nothing about the body.
- It does not detect falls. There are no sensors.
- It does not contact emergency services. It never calls an ambulance, the police, or a hospital on anyone's behalf.
- It does not track location. It does not know where anyone is.
If the honest answer for your relative is "they might collapse and be unable to call for help", you want a personal alarm or telecare, and you want it soon. Start with the local council's adult social services team and ask for an assessment.
What Y.O.D.O. does instead
It answers a different question: has anybody noticed that this person has gone quiet?
An Account Holder chooses a rhythm, monthly on every plan and daily, weekly or fortnightly on the higher ones, and confirms with one tap. If a Check-In is missed past the buffer they set, the Delegates they named are contacted and asked to get in touch. A person then decides what to do, because a person is better at that than any system.
Two things follow from that design. The first is that nobody is being watched: there is no feed, no location, and no data about the day. The second is that it works for the far larger group of people who are not at clinical risk but are, in practice, unaccounted for between phone calls.
They are not mutually exclusive
The most sensible setup we see is often both. An alarm for the emergency that needs a monitoring centre in seconds, and a check-in rhythm for the ordinary week where nothing has happened and nobody would know if it had.
They cost different things, they answer different questions, and neither substitutes for the other.
If you are choosing for a parent
Ask what you are actually afraid of. "They will fall and not be able to call anyone" and "weeks go by and I have no idea how they are" are different fears with different answers, and families often buy for the first while feeling the second.
We wrote a longer piece on checking in on an elderly parent without it feeling like surveillance, which is usually the real obstacle.
If the check-in question is the one you recognise, Y.O.D.O. is here. If it is the alarm question, please go and get an alarm.
Check in. Live on.