How we score, and how we're paid.

What this site is

Top Medical Alert Systems is a comparison service for personal emergency response systems sold in the United States. We research providers, price them, score them against a fixed set of criteria, and either point you to the ones that fit or connect you with a specialist who can talk it through.

We are not a monitoring service. We cannot dispatch help, and we do not sell or install equipment. If you are in an emergency, call 911.

How we're paid

We earn a commission when a reader buys through one of our links or takes a call with a partner provider. That is our entire revenue model, and it's disclosed at the top of every page and next to every outbound link.

This creates an obvious conflict of interest, so here is precisely how we handle it:

• The scoring weights are fixed before we evaluate anyone. They are published below and applied identically to partners and non-partners.
• Commercial terms never move a score. No provider can pay for a higher score, a badge, or a better position, and none has ever been offered the opportunity.
• We rank providers we earn nothing from, and we have placed partners below them where the scoring says so.
• What compensation does affect is breadth of access: which providers give us equipment, pricing detail and support-line access to review in depth. We say so plainly rather than pretending the relationship doesn't exist.

Full detail is on our advertiser disclosure page.

The five factors

Every provider is graded out of 10 on the same five criteria, weighted by how much each one changes the outcome in a real emergency.

• Response time · 30%Heaviest weight

  Seconds from button press to a live, US-based operator, sampled repeatedly at different times of day. This is the only thing that matters at the moment the system is used, so it carries the most weight.

• Total cost of ownership · 25%

  Not the advertised monthly rate. The real two-year cost including activation, equipment, fall detection, protection plans and any cancellation penalty.

• Equipment and coverage · 20%

  Range from the base station, battery life, water resistance, cellular network quality, and fall-detection behaviour in practice.

• Contract terms · 15%

  Lock-in length, early termination fees, refund window, and how hard it is to cancel. Multi-year contracts are penalised heavily.

• Support and caregiver tools · 10%Lightest weight

  Caregiver app quality, family alerting, hold times on the customer service line, and how a cancellation request is handled.

How we test

Where a provider will supply equipment, we use it. We time the response from button press to a live operator, repeatedly and at different hours. We read the contract in full, including the cancellation clause. We call the customer service line as an ordinary customer and time the hold. Where we cannot obtain equipment, we say so in the review rather than scoring on marketing material.

We do not publish prices. Rates change constantly, and a stale figure on a comparison site is worse than no figure at all. A specialist quotes the current number for the plan that fits, with every add-on itemised. Provider ratings are re-reviewed quarterly; the most recent review was August 2026.

Corrections

If something on this site is wrong (a price, a contract term, a claim about a provider), tell us and we will correct it and note the change. Accuracy is the only reason anyone should trust a comparison site.