Dear LPG, 

As you get a bit older one of the things that can be a worry is your stability.  I think that younger people do their fair share of falling too but as we get older our ‘pick yourself up and dust yourself off‘  coping mechanisms don’t work quite as well as they used to.

Firstly, there are those medical conditions which have side effects that manage to leave us more prone to being less stable than we once were.  Failing eyesight, the fact that our reactions are much slower even if we can feel a fall coming on and the susceptibility of older bones to breakage are just three factors from the tip of an iceberg that might leave so many more of us oldies a lot more likely to find ourselves at floor level before we know it.

I am sure that all too many pensioners know that a fall can happen at any time and, if you live on your own, they are an even more worrying factor.

There is no way that we can stop them from happening from time to time but if, like me, you do live alone it can be a worry.   I started wondering what measures you can put in place to minimise the consequences.  

Most of us have heard of the personal alarm services which are vital as long as you can press the alert button, but it occurs to me that I might find myself unable to sound the alarm if I were to become unconscious after a fall.

This is when I started to investigate the newer appliances that also include fall detection.  

From what I understand, this means that as long as you are wearing it, if you fall the speed of movement will alert a call centre whether you are able to make contact by pressing a panic button or not.

While doing a little internet research for myself, it occurred to me that, though a lot of the online information on the subject is written by agencies trying to sell these alarms, I found a couple of arguably impartial assessments.

I have asked LPG to share my findings just in case anyone else is thinking along the same lines as myself. 

LY, Catford

LY shares her findings… 

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