Actually, it can be much more efficient, for a number of reasons:
- The time to speak to our monitoring service agent through your watch can frequently be faster than connecting to 911.
- The monitoring agent can handle both major (“send EMS”) and minor (“call my neighbor and have them help me”) emergencies that you may communicate.
- In the event that an alert gets sent from the watch and you are not responsive:
- Your GPS location should be readily available to the monitoring agent. That is not always the case with 911.
- The agent can contact your emergency contacts can do a wellness check to see if the Kanega Watch wearer is OK. 911 will not do that.
- The agent can dispatch EMS directly, as 911 can, but the agent can also provide the EMS dispatch with the wearer’s medical info (health status, medication allergies, etc.) as well as lockbox/spare key info if that is in the wearer’s profile provided during watch set-up.
- 911 may not dispatch if they get no response from the caller, due to the overwhelming number of false alerts flooding 911 these days from the Apple Watch and related devices. Here is a recent article which describes this phenomenon.