Older Women Living Alone: Who Falls, Injures, and Fractures Most

More falls, more injuries

Across US surveillance data, older women report falling more often than men and being injured more often when they do. Between 2012 and 2018, 29.1% of older women reported a fall in the prior year versus 25.5% of men, and 11.9% of women reported a fall injury versus 7.9% of men (CDC/MMWR, Moreland et al., 2020). Part of the injury gap is bone: because osteoporosis is far more common in women, a fall that a stronger skeleton would shrug off can become a fracture — and more than 95% of hip fractures are caused by falling, about three-quarters of them in women (AAOS/OrthoInfo, 2023).

So while men have the higher fall death rate, women bear the larger everyday load of falls, injuries and fractures — and the recovery, the fear of falling again, and the threat to independence that come with them.

Living alone rises steeply with age for women

Women are also the most exposed to the response gap. The share of US women living alone climbs with age — about 27% of women aged 65-74 and 43% of women 75 and older live alone (US Census Bureau, 2022). Combine that with more frequent falls and more frequent injuries, and older women living alone are, statistically, the group most likely to experience a fall with no one present.

The consequence of not being found quickly is the same for everyone: 82% of falls in adults 90+ happened when the person was alone (Fleming & Brayne, BMJ 2008), about half of older home-fallers who had a long lie died within six months (Wild et al., BMJ 1981), and mortality rises with time to discovery (12% within an hour versus 67% after 72 hours; Gurley et al., NEJM 1996). For a woman recovering alone after a fracture, a fast alert is also what protects the independence she is trying to keep.

Protecting independence with a faster alert

The goal for an older woman living independently is rarely to move — it is to stay, safely. A safety net that shortens the time to being found does exactly that: it lets you keep your home and your routine while making sure a fall is never a silent one.

Phone fall detection is coming to the I'm Alive app in our next update (v2.3.0). When it arrives, it will detect a hard fall, check on you first with a full-screen "Are you okay?" and a countdown, and — only if you don't respond — alert the trusted contacts you chose, with your location. It never calls 911 and is not wired to a monitoring call center; help comes from your own people. It runs on your phone (no pendant or smartwatch to wear), it is opt-in and off by default, and it is best-effort, not a medical device. It is included from the Protect Me plan ($29.99/year), with location on the move on Protect Me On The Move ($39.99/year); the daily check-in is always free (Try It, $0), and there is a one-time Stay Connected lifetime upgrade at $4.99.

Fall detection is one layer; the free daily check-in is the other, and for many women recovering from a fracture at home it is the more useful of the two, because it catches the slow, quiet emergencies as well as the sudden ones.