Daily check-in apps for seniors living alone in Australia.
If someone you love lives on their own, you have probably worked out that the worry is not a fall. It is the hours afterwards, when nobody knows yet. Here is what a daily check-in app actually does about that, how it compares with a pendant or a morning phone call, and when it is the wrong choice.
Free plan, no pendant, no tracking. Made in Perth, Western Australia.
The short answer
A daily check-in app is an app where a person who lives alone confirms once a day that they are okay, usually with one tap. The family they choose can see that it happened. If the day goes by without it, family are told.
It does not call an ambulance and it does not detect a fall. What it does is put a limit on how long something can go unnoticed. Instead of finding out on Friday, you know by ten in the morning.
The problem is the gap, not the fall
Ask families what they are frightened of and almost nobody says the word "fall". They describe the gap that comes after it. Being on the kitchen floor overnight. Driving over on a Friday with a sinking feeling because there has been no answer since Tuesday. Being on the other side of the world and knowing that if something happened today, nobody would find out for days.
That gap is the thing a daily check-in closes. It cannot stop someone falling. Nothing on this page can. But it turns "we might not know for days" into "we will know this morning", and for most families that is the difference that lets everyone relax a little.
It also solves a problem people rarely admit to. Most families already try to do this informally. A morning text. A phone call. A rule that Mum rings when she wakes up. It works for a fortnight and then life gets in the way, someone is busy, and a quiet day slips past unnoticed. A check-in app is really just the version of that habit that does not depend on anyone remembering.
"I've run over her house so many times, with that sinking feeling of terror, to see if she was OK."A daughter, on a caregiving forum. This is the feeling the whole category exists to fix.
How a daily check-in works
Three steps, and only the first one involves the person living alone.
A reminder arrives in the morning. One tap says "I'm fine today". It takes a couple of seconds and there is nothing to learn.
The people they have chosen see that the check-in happened. No phone call needed, on either side.
If the check-in does not happen, family are told, so somebody knows to pick up the phone or go around.
Why a tap gets used when a pendant does not
Personal alarms work. When someone presses the button, help comes. The catch is well known to anyone who has bought one for a parent: the pendant has to be worn, and an enormous number of them are not. Families describe finding them in drawers, on bedside tables, still in the box. Some describe a parent having a fall while the alarm sat in the next room.
The refusal is usually not about technology. It is about what the thing says about you. A pendant around the neck announces to every visitor that this person needs watching. People who have spent eighty years being the one who looks after everybody else do not always take kindly to that, and the more the family pushes, the more it becomes a matter of pride.
A daily tap sits differently. Nothing is worn. Nothing is visible to visitors. And the action belongs to the person doing it. They are not being checked on, they are telling their family they are fine, which is a thing they would probably want to do anyway. It is their "I'm fine", not your surveillance.
There is a fair question buried in all of this, and it is worth asking out loud: is this for their peace of mind or for yours? Often the honest answer is both. A check-in app is easier to agree to precisely because it gives the person something in return, which is being left alone to get on with life without anyone ringing every afternoon to make sure.
What a check-in app is not
It is worth being blunt about the limits, because the wrong tool creates false reassurance, which is more dangerous than no tool at all. HelloToday is not:
- Not a monitored medical alarm. There is no monitoring centre, and no one is on call. It cannot send an ambulance.
- Not a fall detector. It does not sense movement or impact. It only knows whether the check-in happened.
- Not an emergency button. If something is happening right now, the answer is still 000.
- Not a tracker. No GPS, no location, no camera, no microphone. Family see that a check-in happened, and nothing else.
- Not right for moderate or advanced dementia. A check-in only works if the person remembers to do it and understands why. Once that stops being reliable, so does the safety net.
If what you need is emergency response, get a monitored alarm. If the person cannot reliably use an app, look at passive sensors or in-home care. A daily check-in is for someone who is cognitively well, lives independently, and wants to keep it that way.
The options in Australia, side by side
These are the four things Australian families actually choose between. They are not really competitors, because they solve different problems and plenty of households use more than one.
Scroll the table sideways to see all columns.| Option | Cost | How it works | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily check-in app (HelloToday) | Free plan. Premium A$16.99/mo or A$169.99/yr, with a 7 day free trial for new users. | One tap each morning. Family see it. A missed check-in alerts them by push, and by SMS on Premium. | Nothing to wear or charge. No emergency response. Needs a smartphone or tablet. |
| Monitored personal alarm (for example MePACS) | Home alarm from about $42/month with no device cost. Mobile alarm $385, watches $795 to $825. Bundles $55 to $59/month. | Press the button and a 24/7 monitoring centre answers, assesses and can send an ambulance. | Real emergency response, day or night. Only works if it is actually worn. Funding may apply. |
| Unmonitored alarm (for example LiveLife) | $567 pendant or $597 watch, then $90/year from year two. | Press the button and it calls and texts family directly. Includes fall detection and GPS. | No monthly fee, but a large upfront cost. Still only works if it is worn. Family are the responders. |
| Red Cross Telecross | Free. | A volunteer phones every morning between 8:00 and 9:30, 365 days a year. No answer means another attempt, then your nominated contacts are called. | Excellent and genuinely free, but it needs a My Aged Care or NDIS referral, and the call window is fixed. |
| A daily phone call from family | Free. | You ring each morning. | Best option of all when it happens. The problem is that it depends on someone remembering every single day, forever. |
Prices checked August 2026 from each provider's own website: MePACS, LiveLife, Red Cross Telecross. Alarm pricing changes often and funding through My Aged Care, Support at Home, a Home Care Package or the NDIS can reduce it substantially, so confirm current figures with the provider.
If your parent is already registered with My Aged Care, start with Telecross. It is free, it is a real human being, and it has been the backbone of daily checking in this country for decades. The reasons families come to an app instead are usually practical: no referral needed, the check-in is not locked to a 90 minute morning window, and the people who hear about a missed day are the family rather than a call centre.
What you get for what you pay
Price on its own tells you very little here. The cheapest option in this market is not automatically the best one, and neither is the most expensive. The useful question is what each dollar is actually buying.
HelloToday's free plan is not a trial. It does the core job forever: one check-in each morning at 8am, one connected family member, and a push notification to them if the check-in is missed. For a lot of households that is genuinely enough, and we would rather you stayed on it than paid for something you do not need.
Premium is A$16.99 a month, or A$169.99 a year, which works out around A$14.17 a month. It adds the things families ask for once they have lived with the free plan for a while:
- Check-in times that suit the person. The free plan is fixed at 8am, which several of our own users have told us is too early. Premium lets you set the time, and run up to three check-ins a day.
- SMS alerts as well as push notifications. This matters more than it sounds. Push notifications get swallowed by Do Not Disturb and Focus modes, and a missed alert is the way these systems fail. An SMS does not depend on notification settings.
- Up to about ten connections, so siblings and grandchildren can all be in the loop rather than one person relaying news.
- A "checked in okay" notification, so family get the good news each morning rather than only hearing when something is wrong.
- History and a calendar view, which is quietly useful for spotting a pattern changing.
- Personal setup help from us, if getting it going is the hard part.
New users get seven days of Premium free. To keep two different things clear: the free plan is free forever, and separately there is a seven day free trial of Premium. You can read the full pricing and feature breakdown if you want the detail.
For a sense of scale, a full year of Premium costs about the same as four months of monitoring on a typical Australian home alarm plan, and roughly a third of the upfront price of an unmonitored pendant before you have paid a single annual renewal (see the full Australian alarm cost breakdown). That is not an argument that we are better. A monitored alarm does something we genuinely cannot do, and if you need an ambulance at three in the morning, no app on this page is the answer. It is an argument for working out which job you are actually trying to do, and paying for that one properly, rather than buying the most expensive thing on the shelf and hoping it covers everything.
The part that actually decides whether it works
One thing shows up in our own data more strongly than anything else, and it is worth passing on even though it is slightly awkward to admit in public.
People who set up HelloToday and connect a family member are still using it a fortnight later at a rate of about 77 percent. People who set it up on their own and never connect anyone are at about 6 percent. Same app, same check-in, wildly different outcome.
The reason is not complicated. Tapping a button into the void gets old within a week. Tapping it because your daughter in Melbourne sees it and stops worrying is a completely different act. The connection is not a feature of the safety net, it is the safety net.
So whatever you end up choosing, do the connecting part on day one. Not next week. It is the single step that decides whether any of this is still running in a month.
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Common questions
A daily check-in app is a phone or tablet app where someone who lives alone confirms once a day that they are okay, usually with a single tap. The people they choose can see the check-in has happened. If the day passes without one, those people are told, so nobody has to wonder or keep ringing to find out.
There is no clinical rule, and the honest answer is that it depends on their health, their mobility and how close you live. What matters more than frequency is consistency. A short check that happens every single day without fail tells you more than a long phone call that happens whenever both of you remember. Most families find once each morning is enough, because it puts a limit on how long anything could go unnoticed.
They get a reminder first, because the most common reason for a missed check-in is simply forgetting. If it still has not happened, the family members they have connected are notified. On the free plan that is a push notification. On Premium it is a push notification and an SMS, which is more reliable because it does not depend on notification settings. It is then up to family to ring or go around.
No, and the difference matters. HelloToday has no GPS, no location tracking, no camera and no microphone. Family cannot see where the person is or what they are doing. All that is shared is whether the person chose to check in today. The tap belongs to them. It is closer to saying good morning than to being watched, which is exactly why it tends to be accepted where a tracking app is refused.
Usually not, and it is better to say so plainly. A daily check-in relies on the person remembering to do it and understanding what it is for. Someone in the earliest stages may manage with a reminder and family support, but as dementia progresses the check-in stops being reliable, and an unreliable safety net is worse than none because it creates false reassurance. For moderate or advanced dementia, look at monitored alarms, passive sensors or in-home care instead.
No. A monitored personal alarm is an emergency device. Press the button and a monitoring centre answers and can send an ambulance, whether it is three in the afternoon or three in the morning. A check-in app cannot do that. What it does is limit how long a problem stays unnoticed, and it works for the many people who will not wear a pendant. Some families use both. Many use a check-in app because the pendant ended up in a drawer.
Yes. The person living alone uses the app to check in, and each family member uses it to see that the check-in happened and to get alerts if it does not. Setting up that connection is the step that matters most. People who are connected to family keep using HelloToday far longer than people who set it up alone, so it is worth doing on day one rather than leaving it for later.
There is a free plan that does the core job: one check-in each morning at 8am, one connected family member, and a push notification to them if it is missed. Premium is A$16.99 a month or A$169.99 a year and adds flexible check-in times, up to three check-ins a day, more reminders, up to about ten connections, SMS alerts as well as push, a history calendar, and help setting the whole thing up. New users can try Premium free for seven days.
You'll know by ten in the morning.
One tap from them. Peace of mind for everyone else. Free to start, and nothing to wear.
Free plan available forever. New users can try Premium free for 7 days.