Falling Alone at Home: A Walkthrough

This is the scenario Family Plus was designed around. Here's what happens in real time when an elderly parent falls at home and cannot get to their phone — minute by minute.

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The "long lie" — lying on the floor for more than an hour after a fall — is a strong independent predictor of medical complications and loss of independence, even if the initial injury is minor.

The Challenge

Most falls among solo-living elderly happen indoors, often in the bathroom or bedroom — places where a pendant may be off and a phone may be out of reach

Traditional medical alerts depend on the fallen person pressing a button, which 40% of injured fallers cannot do

Family is often hundreds or thousands of miles away, with no pattern of daily contact that would surface a fall quickly

How I'm Alive Helps

Our system relies on your parent's inaction — missing the scheduled check-in — which is the same signal a pendant-press is meant to be, but inverted

A miss triggers a known, timed escalation to you — no waiting for a neighbor to notice or for someone to happen to call

Family Plus adds location context to the escalation so you are not also solving a wayfinding problem during the emergency

Minute 0-10: the grace window

Your parent wakes at their usual time. Their phone sends a check-in reminder; they don't respond because they have just fallen in the hallway and cannot reach it. At minute 5 past their check-in time, the escalation promotes to stage 1. They receive a push and an email, both of which go unanswered. Nothing has been sent to you yet. At minute 10, stage 2 fires — still a louder reminder to them, still nothing to you. This grace window is deliberately long enough to absorb 'they were in the shower' and 'they went to the corner shop' without false-alarming you twice a week.

Minute 10-11: first contact with you

Stage 3 fires. You receive — in order, essentially simultaneously — a push notification, an email, and an SMS. All three link to the contact-resolution page at imalive.co/c/<token>. On Family Plus, two additional things happen at the same moment, both invisible to the escalating user: Your parent's phone receives a silent push of type `capture_location`. The phone wakes, takes one coarse location reading, reverse-geocodes it to a neighborhood name, and posts the result to our capture endpoint. The endpoint accepts it because your parent is on an active Family Plus subscription and the incident is live. Our voice-agent service places an AI-generated call to you (not to your parent). The call, typically answered within 3-4 rings, says: "This is a Family Plus notification from I'm Alive. [Parent name] has missed their check-in at [time]. Their phone reports their location as near [neighborhood name]. Press 1 to acknowledge, 2 if you'll check on them in person, or 9 to escalate further." The location reading and the voice call converge into the contact-resolution page you already have open in your browser or your inbox.

What to do when you're the contact

Your parent is on the floor. Here is the useful order of operations: Call your parent first. If they're able to answer, they'll answer — they hear the phone. If they don't, that is itself information. Open the resolution page from the email link while the phone rings. Look at the location card. The neighborhood name lets you confirm they're home (not at a neighbor's or a cafe) and is enough for emergency services if you need to direct them. Tap 'Open in Maps' for the pin if you need to share it. Decide the next step based on your plan. If you have a neighbor or a local key-holder, call them. If you don't, the right answer in most cases is a non-emergency call to local services describing the scenario ('elderly parent lives alone, has missed their daily check-in, is not answering phone, confirmed at home'). The dispatcher will do a welfare check. Use the page's 'Escalate further' button if you cannot reach anyone locally — it cascades the notification to any other contacts on your parent's plan. Resolve the incident once your parent is being cared for. The location card disappears within seconds, and the 72-hour auto-delete clock starts.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What if my parent falls and their phone is in the next room?

The scheduled check-in still fires the escalation at the scheduled time — the system works on inaction, not on the phone being reachable in the moment. The location capture during stage 3 will report the phone's location (which may be the next room), not the fallen person's, but you will still know the home address range and can dispatch help to that address.

Can I pre-authorize the app to call emergency services?

No. We deliberately do not dial emergency services, because false-positive rates (someone missed check-in because they went to the shop) could cause real harm to the 911/112/111 system. Every incident routes through a human contact. That's usually you.

Does the app detect the fall itself?

No. Accelerometer-based fall detection is a different product category — Apple Watch and specific medical devices offer it. Our signal is the missed check-in; our strength is that it doesn't require the parent to be wearing anything.

What if my parent's phone is dead when they fall?

The escalation still fires on schedule (the cron runs server-side). The contact notifications still deliver. The location capture fails — the phone isn't online to receive the silent push — and the contact sees 'no location available' rather than stale data. The rest of the flow proceeds normally.