Safety + Style: Beautiful jewelry that’s also a medical alert device

Published December 16, 2020

One of the longstanding challenges in the medical alert industry is that devices serve function over form, but somewhat paradoxically, are worn predominantly by women who don’t want to trade style for safety.  

Women of all ages, including seniors, want to look beautiful. While many are willing to wear a small device to ensure protection during an emergency, there’s a whole group who simply won’t do it. Or, they carry the burden in order to maintain their independence because if they don’t, there’s an awareness that caregivers will be incentivized to put other systems in place to protect their loved ones. 

Creating for the Customer 

For many years, the entire industry focused on improving safety features like size, mobile capability, and speaker strength. This made sense because you can’t have an emergency response system without the nuts and bolts; indeed, these features are precisely what protect people’s lives. But in all this, the target customer got lost a bit. 

In recent times, there’s a renaissance in focus on the customer across all industries, with brands spending more time obsessing and building around how their users feel about product, how they engage with the brand, and how they see themselves when using it. An empowered customer voice on social media plays a big role here. As a result, you see an unwavering focus to align product to things like lifestyle needs, and it’s those companies focusing on this that are getting happy users.  

The lesson of course is that customers should always come first. Now there’s finally a solution to this challenge in the medical alert industry. 

Form Matches Function 

At LifeStation, we just launched a new product line called LifeStation Luxury, a beautifully crafted jewelry pendant that’s also equipped with the key features normally found in a medical alert device. 

For women who need safety protection and caregivers who are trying to provide it, they shouldn’t have to trade style for safety. Now they don’t have to. It all comes packaged in one shot. 

And to ensure it can support daily activities outside the home and with friends, the system is fully mobile.

 The device’s custom design includes a case with rhodium colored plating and accented with a center faceted lapis blue resin stone. It weighs in at approximately 2 ounces so is very light around the neck and sports a battery that keeps it running for up to one year. 

Future-Proofing Tech 

While a beautiful pendant like this could be a paradigm shift for the industry and open up the promise of independence to more seniors, there’s more to the story. 

A perpetual challenge in consumer technology is how to extend the lifespan of your product lineup. The endless upgrade cycles of cellphones are a prime example since advancements are being made all the time in the race to defend and increase market share. The problem is that consumers don’t always want to upgrade as it costs time and money. 

The medical alert industry operates on a longer time scale, but there’s an analog when you look at the remote patient monitoring space. There’s a quickly growing landscape of Bluetooth enabled devices that can track things like your heart, blood pressure, movement, and more. 

Being able to get all this data into one place and used for care management is something that already happens today, but it isn’t easy, and will only get harder to keep up as new technologies keep emerging.

That’s why LifeStation set out to build a system that would be able to grow with the rapidly diversifying telehealth market.

A key ingredient to realizing this vision was incorporating Bluetooth.

| LifeStation Luxury is the first on the market to pair wirelessly using Bluetooth technology.

In building a flexible technology platform that allows for piping in data from emerging tech devices as they come to market over the next several years, the idea is that you can create an evolving hub of connected health data that can be leveraged by caregivers and medical professionals to improve care and health outcomes.

LifeStation’s Mobile LTE solution is designed to act as this hub and is poised to evolve with the landscape to assist in building a 360 view of users who can benefit from connected health solutions while remaining in their homes.

To learn more about LifeStation Luxury, click here.