GreatCall Targets 65+ Market with Health and Safety Services

GreatCall "Splash" pendant device (Used with permission)

fee (the service was introduced for an additional $15 a month), users can press a red “5Star” button on their large font Jitterbug mobile phone to connect to a GreatCall customer service representative at any time.

GreatCall last venture round—totaling $7 million—was in 2012, and Williams said the business is now profitable, although the company decline to provide information about its earnings or customer base. GreatCall has raised a total of about $75 million from investors, according to CrunchBase. Its headcount has increased from 350 in 2010 to nearly 1,000 today, including call centers in San Diego and Reno, NV.

Today, about half of GreatCall’s new customers are getting the extra personal emergency service, Williams said. GreatCall operators also can forward calls to a registered nurse or doctor when needed, he added.

Unlike in-home emergency response providers like First Alert, which use the equivalent of cordless phone technology to connect a customer’s emergency pendant to a landline, Williams said GreatCall’s fall detection technology relies on wireless networks and is “fully mobile.”

GreatCall Jitterbug 5
Jitterbug 5 mobile phone

In addition to the Splash pendant, which includes GPS locator technology, Jitterbug users can add the fall detection service to their mobile phone plan as part of GreatCall’s “Ultimate Health & Safety Package for an additional $35 a month.

Last year, GreatCall introduced a mobile app called Link, which is intended to provide information to relatives and caregivers about Splash users’ activities. Friends and family who download the Link app to their smartphone can get an alert, for example, when the user of a GreatCall device contacts a 5Star service representative in an emergency. The app also provides information on an elderly user’s location and activities.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.