Life Alert
Innovation Built Around Reliability and Always-On Protection

Miriam Shepher, President and CEO

About forty years ago, Miriam Shepher’s family was held at gunpoint during a break-in at their home. In the frightening aftermath, they kept returning to one question: What happens when someone is alone and cannot reach a phone, whether because of a break-in, fire, fall or health emergency? No system had been built around that need, especially for seniors living independently. That realization became Life Alert.

The question still guides the company. Life Alert builds around the member, not the other way around, and it says “members” on purpose, never customers or subscribers. These are people trusting it with some of the most critical moments of their lives, and the company treats that trust as a responsibility.

Technology gets the same test. Life Alert adopts it when it solves a real problem, and more capability should never mean more for the member to manage.

“Technology will continue to change. Our standard for reliability, continuous protection and human response will not,” says Miriam Shepher, President and CEO.

Protection Without Another Routine

Charging is the clearest example. Many wearable medical alert devices need it every one to five days. Life Alert devices never do, so the wearable stays with the member, ready day and night. The company starts by listening to members and their families. Over the years it has heard stories of people who reached for a medical alert device and found a dead battery, or found it still sitting on its charger. Others simply forgot to put it back on. A safety device should not give a senior one more thing to remember.

The same thinking shapes the rest of the system. Members can speak directly through the waterproof wearable for clearer communication. GPS supports help away from home. A Shower HELP Button covers the bathroom, where falls are common.

Human Response at the Center

When a member presses the button, the call goes to Life Alert’s own U.S.-based Emergency Dispatch Centers, which the company owns and operates rather than outsourcing to third-party monitoring. The centers are UL Listed and Five Diamond Certified by The Monitoring Association.

Dispatchers train for up to a year because a quick human response is critical in an emergency. They answer and stay on the line until help arrives.

One member, R.F., Williston, described it best: “I fell in the middle of the night and injured myself. Life Alert promptly contacted my family and the paramedics and helped manage and communicated about the situation until completion. Very thorough, responsive, and calm.”

For families choosing a system, Shepher suggests starting with one question: if a loved one were alone and something happened, how would that person reach help, and who would respond? Life Alert was built around that question.

The company has been answering it since 1987. Its Help! Ive fallen and I can’t get up!® message became famous because it describes a real problem: someone can be independent one moment and unable to get up, reach a phone or call for help the next. Decades later, the phrase stands for a track record.

Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop endorsed Life Alert. The company has collected more than 48,000 member testimonials and thousands of independent reviews, and it reports 4.9-star ratings on Google, ConsumerAffairs, Trustpilot and BestCompany, along with an A+ BBB rating.

Today, Life Alert helps save a life from a potential catastrophe every 11 minutes and has helped save more than 865,000 lives since tracking began in 2008.

Recognized as the Top Independent Living Medical Alert System 2026, Life Alert still measures itself against the question that started it all.