Philips Lifeline, GoSafe: Review

After a number of tests and days of wearing around the Philips Lifeline GoSafe, here are the results.

This product was part of our "go anywhere" comparative test of emergency response products, and you can read how this product compares to the others at the link below.

Read the "Mobile Alert Systems: Comparative Testing".

Summary

My biggest take away from testing this product is that it is extremely well engineered. It has numerous nice features. More on the good features below. But it also has two negatives. And it is the most expensive of the products we tested.

If I wanted a product that maximized my chances of staying safe, and was not concerned about price or appearance, this would be the product I would choose, with one caveat. In terms of performance, the one area where this product fell short was the time it took for a responder to come on the line after I pressed the alert button. If you care a lot about speed of response, this should be a cause for concern.

Precision engineering

This product has numerous touches that make it stand out. Some of these are discussed in the comparative article mentioned above. But here they are again.

1. Because it uses a home base station, as well as having a pendant that can "go anywhere", it eliminates the concern about working at home in rooms that don't have good cell coverage.
    
2. Because the pendant has voice through the pendant, even if you hurt yourself out of voice range from the home base station (eg in the bathroom or garden) you dont need to worry whether you will hear the responder. They will talk to you from the pendant.
    
3. It has autodetection of falls, which is a nice feature. Given the quality of the rest of the engineering, we suspect their fall detection is as good as anyone's. Although we have not confirmed that with tests.
    
4. Autodetection of falls has an inevitable corollary of false alarms. Because of the "talk through pendant" feature, it greatly reduces the danger of a false alarm leading to people breaking down the door, because when the false alarm goes off, the responder will talk to you through the pendant, and assuming you have it on, you will be able to tell them it was a false alarm.
    
5. The product has a built in siren that the responder can activate if they think you are in danger but dont know exactly how to pinpoint your location for the emergency responders.
    
6. The pendant is not a simple box, but a smoothly rounded ergonomic shape and wearing it under a shirt or sweater is comfortable.
    
7. The button itself has a very nice positive click when you press it. There is no uncertainty about whether or not it "activated". This is in contrast to some of the other products we tested that sometimes take a press or two before activating.
    
8. There is a very comprehensive communications engine that talks to you under a number of circumstances. For example it guides you though setup, and reminds you when to charge the pendant. While I normally find this sort of thing annoying, this implementation was helpful.
    
9. The sound coming from the pendant (ie the volume of the responders voice when they talk to you) is quite a lot louder than from any of the other products. I did not try and measure this but I felt it was a lot more easy to hear in noisy environments than the competing products.

Location capability

The Philips Lifeline GoSafe performed very well at finding my location, although like all such products it can not tell which floor you are on once you are inside. In 10 separate tests at different locations in Northern California, it failed to deliver a location within a block of actual location on only 1 out of 10 tests (and on that occasion it was within two blocks). This is better than most of the other products we tested, being similar to the GreatCall Splash in this respect.

Some negatives

There are two things I did not like so much. The first was the response times. The second was the appearance.

Slow response times

In our testing over the last month response time (from when I pressed the button until someone started talking to me) averaged 91 seconds. (Max: 146 seconds; Min: 66 seconds; N=13). This is noticeably worse than its competitors (see article above). This is a bit surprising as the Philips Lifeline website claims an average response time of 22 seconds. All I can say is that was not my experience in a series of 13 tests over 20 days.

Looks medical

The second negative is the fact that it looks inescapably like a medical product, and sends a clear message that you are old or a patient. I think once one reaches a stage in life were one does indeed feel old, frail, infirm and at risk, then this may well not matter. But for those who like the idea of an emergency response button, but still feel active and in the middle of living, I worry this is a negative.

Other comments

We triggered one false alarm when we dropped the pendant into its charging cradle. But the responder reached me and all was well.

According to my kitchen scale the pendant weighs 2.1 oz.

The Philips Lifeline GoSafe is waterproof to a specific standard called  IP67: ("highly water resistant: submerged in water for up to 3 feet and up to 30 minutes"). As are the competitors GreatCall Splash and Numera Libris.