The Alert1 Home offers many of the features you'd expect from an in-home medical alert system including large colorful buttons, clean (and loud) hands-free audio, and most importantly, fast response times.
It's a snap to install and is affordably priced, but it requires an activation fee and lacks some of the extra features that you get with our Editors' Choice, the MobileHelp Classic.
Design, Features, and Pricing
The Alert1 Home uses a base station that hooks up to your landline telephone jack (a cellular version is also available).
The off-white plastic enclosure measures 2.5 by 8.3 by 6.7 inches (HWD) and contains an oval-shaped red backlit Emergency button that is 2.8 inches long and 1 inch wide.
To the right of it is a round green Reset button that is 1.2 inches in diameter, and two small LED indictors (Test and Power).
At the top of the unit is a speaker, and off to the left is a microphone for two-way hands-free communication with a live emergency response agent.
Around back are two telephone jacks that allow you to connect to your landline and your telephone handset, and a hardwired power cord.
There's another LED indicator to the left of the Emergency button for the alarm status: a red alarm light with one or two beeps means that you're having power issues, three beeps means there's no dial tone, and four beeps means the internal battery is low.
The base station has an internal rechargeable battery that will provide power for up to 24 hours in the event of an outage.
The system comes with either a portable help button pendant or a wrist strap button, both of which are waterproof and have a range of up to 600 feet.
Unlike the MobileHelp Classic and LifeFone At Home systems, which provide a free secondary pendant button for spouses, Alert1 charges $19.95 for each additional button.
Wall buttons and lock boxes go for $39.95 each.
There's a web portal for billing purposes, but you don't get the useful tools that you get with the LifeFone At Home and MobileHelp Classic including activity tracking utilities, an event history log, and alerts via text message and email to caregivers and family members.
The Alert1 Home monthly subscription fee is $25.95 per month, but if you pay annually or semi-annually, it's reduced to $19.95 per month.
However, that price is for one person: If you want to add another user in the same household, the price goes up to $30.95 anually or $24.95 semi-annually per month.
Most of the competing services we've reviewed offer free spousal coverage.
Alert1 also charges a $50 activation fee and a $15.95 shipping fee, though it runs frequent promotions where these fees are reduced or waived.
You can sign up for wellness calls and medicine reminders for an additional $14.95 per month, but that's much more expensive than LifeFone's $5 per month service.
If you require fall detection, the Alert1Home Fall Detection system goes for $30.95 per month.
Installation and Performance
Installing the Alert1 Home system is as easy as plugging in the base station and connecting the phone cord.
Pairing the portable help pendant is an extra step that is not necessary with other systems I've reviewed, but it only takes a few seconds: I pressed and held the Reset button for five seconds until the system beeped twice and the Power LED began flashing green, then held down the Emergency button and the Help button on the pendant until the system beeped twice.
Finally, I pressed the Reset button one more time.
The Power LED turned solid green and I was ready to go.
The Alert1 delivered an average response time (the time it takes for a live agent to respond after you've pressed the Emergency button) of 46 seconds in my tests.
That's identical to results for the Medical Guardian Classic Guardian system and just a tad faster than the Lifefone At Home system (48 seconds).
The Bay Alarm Medical and Philips LifeLine HomeSafe systems both averaged 35 seconds.
Live agents were friendly and professional, and always confirmed my name and location with every test call.
The pendant had no trouble initiating a call from anywhere in my one-story, three-bedroom house.
It also worked in my front and back yards and in the basement.
Although two-way communications were clean and very easy to understand, the volume level was a bit too high and hard on the ears.
A volume control such as the one supplied with the MobileHelp Classic would be helpful, but according to an Alert1 spokesperson, the volume is set that high by default to prevent false alarms due to clients being unable to hear the live agent because the volume had been turned down too low.
Conclusions
The Alert1 Home is a solid choice for a landline medical alert system.
It delivered relatively fast response times in testing and has large, easily identifiable buttons.
As with every in-home system we've reviewed, it was very easy to install.
That said, it's also the only system that charges extra for a second user, and while it offers medicine reminders, it lacks the online tools and services that you get with our Editors' Choice for in-home medical alert systems, the MobileHelp Classic.
