MILAE is not telecare
If you came here looking for telecare for your municipality, it is worth understanding the difference before you decide. They answer different problems, and they often work side by side.
What telecare is
Telecare is an emergency response service for the home. The person is given a device, almost always a pendant or wrist button, connected to a call centre that answers at any hour. When something happens, the person presses the button and someone answers.
It is a decades-old service, it works, and it saves lives. In Portugal it is under contract in more than two hundred municipalities, and the organisations that provide it, from the Red Cross to the misericórdias and private operators, do so competently.
It rests, however, on one assumption that shapes everything else: someone has to press the button.
What MILAE does
MILAE does not wait. MILAE is the one that calls.
At whatever cadence the social care team sets, MILAE rings the phone the person already has, landline or mobile, and talks. It asks how they are, listens, and notices when something has changed. From what it heard it writes a summary and flags to the municipality what deserves human attention.
There is no device to install, no app, no internet, and nothing for the person to learn. They answer the phone, the way they would answer a grandchild.
Side by side
| Side by side | Telecare | MILAE |
|---|---|---|
| Who starts the contact | The person, by pressing the button | MILAE, at the agreed cadence |
| What has to be installed | A home terminal and a personal button | Nothing. It uses the phone already there |
| When it acts | After the situation has happened | While the situation is still forming |
| What it detects | Emergencies the person declares | Everyday signals: isolation, persistent sadness, difficulty coping |
| How many people it covers | Those who agreed to have equipment at home | Everyone the services choose to follow |
| Who receives the alert | A call centre | The municipality's social care worker |
Where the difference shows
Someone who is eating less, who has stopped leaving the house, or who is growing more and more alone presses no button at all. There is no emergency to declare. Most situations get worse slowly, and that is exactly where nobody is looking.
It is worth being plain about what MILAE is not: it is not an emergency service, it does not replace the emergency number, and it does not provide health care. What it does is arrive earlier and tell the municipality where to look first. The decision to act always stays with the municipal worker.
The two work well together
Several municipalities we speak to already have telecare under contract, often for a few dozen people. We are not proposing they replace it.
Telecare covers well those already identified as at risk who accepted equipment at home. MILAE covers the rest: the hundreds or thousands of people in the municipality the services know by name but have no hands to follow. And when MILAE flags someone who needs more, telecare or a home visit is often exactly where that person is referred.
Want to see how it works?
We show a real call in a thirty-minute meeting, with your municipality's team.