Thinking about buying a pad that has an alarm if the patient gets up at night. Any advice?

From a personal point of view those d*mn bed and chair alarms drove me nutty in the hospital. you only had to lift your butt off the bed or chair, even reaching for something and half the hospital came running. They never did learn to leave my call bell where i could reach it. "Drink lots of water you have to flush the dye out of your kidneys" " I would if you hadn't left my table three feet away" Not to mention that it was City water.

Not much help to you jss but the ones I sat on were very loud and effective. No idea of the brands. Luckily they did not use them in wheelchairs so when i was abandoned for a couple of hours in rehab I was able to get myself back to my comfy recliner. All against orders of course but i tend to ignore those anyway. When I am get demented i am going to be quite a handful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i will not be a sweet old lady if i am crossed.

I started with a bed alarm. It failed after a month. I found out it was only rated for 60 days. We switched to a motion detector that goes off when DH swings his feet over the side of the bed. It has been great.

I used a motion sensor that sounded a remote alarm if a light beam was interrupted. It took some trial-and-error to get it positioned correctly on a bookcase near the bed but then it worked well. There were false alarms if my husband swung a leg or arm off the bed, but if he was doing that I needed to check on him anyway.

I also used a baby monitor, but getting out of bed doesn't make much noise! The monitor was not so helpful with my mother, unless I wanted to listen to her snore all night!

I found that the trick was in the positioning. You need to make sure that the pad can be kept firmly in place under a bit of the person that doesn't lose contact with the mattress if he or she rolls over or wriggles around during sleep. And if your patient, like my mother, was given to sitting up and faffing about with stuff on her night stand then you either put up with a lot of false alarms from time to time, or you could consider a pressure pad on the floor next to the bed which goes off when the person stands on it. Only then, of course, you have even less time to get there.

Sorry, can't remember brand names; but I expect you'll find there are quality standards they all have to comply with, so that's something to check on.