Smartwatches aren’t just for sending texts and monitoring your fitness activities. Designed to look like a regular watch, the UnaliWear Kanega Watch (starting at $149.99 upfront, then $59.95 per month) is a medical alert device that connects you to an emergency response center with the touch of a button or a simple voice command. It calls for help when you fall down, and also tells you when to take your medicine. If you don’t need fall detection, however, we prefer the Medical Guardian MGMove thanks to its superior caregiver tools and lower subscription pricing.
Easy to Control by Voice
Available with a black or gold bezel, the Kanega Watch face measures 1.6 inches in diameter and is 0.5 inches thick. The screen is a bit larger than that of the Medical Guardian MGMove (1.25 inches in diameter), and the Kanega’s black-and-gold mesh wrist band makes the watch look and feel bulkier. It has an IP67 waterproof rating and you get several straps in the box so you can pick the one that best fits your wrist.
Another reason for the additional heft are the two rechargeable battery packs (one on each side of the watch) that you can remove and charge via the three-port battery charger that comes in the box. You get a total of four batteries in the package, which means you can keep two of them charged at all times. The batteries are easy to swap out, and the process doesn’t even require you to remove the watch. UnaliWear recommends changing the batteries daily and provides free replacements when they reach the end of their charging life (approximately 18 months with regular use).
The Kanega Watch has GPS, cellular (Verizon), and Wi-Fi radios that can help pinpoint your exact location in the event of an emergency. Its screen uses white text on a black background, a departure from the full-color touch screens you get with the LifeStation Sidekick Smart and the Medical Guardian MGMove watches. According to UnaliWear, the high-contrast monochrome display is easier to read if you suffer from glaucoma or macular degeneration.
The right side of the watch houses a speaker and a microphone for two-way hands-free communication and for issuing voice commands. To communicate with the watch using voice commands, begin with the phrase “Fred Astaire,” which is the watch’s name. Once you activate the voice command option, you can ask questions such as, “Fred Astaire, what time is it?” and “Fred Astaire, what day is it?” to hear an audible response. If you say, “Fred Astaire, call the operator,” or, “Fred Astaire, get help,” the watch places a call to the 24/7 emergency response center.
Also on the right side is a crown button that you use to initiate a call to a representative and to navigate through each screen. Press the button for five seconds to connect to an agent, or press and release it quickly to display the current time, day, date, and battery level. Press it a second time to view just the day of the week and date, and then quickly press it twice to toggle to a screen that displays the time, date, battery level, and Wi-Fi signal strength. Continue to single press the crown button to toggle through the settings screens where you select a watch face (you get 12- or 24-hour format and digital or analog options), adjust the speaker volume and screen brightness, update phone settings, enable airplane mode, view a how-to tutorial, and obtain a security code to use with the web portal.
One important note: The Kanega Watch requires a subscription. You can choose between an annual or quarterly plan, but both require you to pay a one-time setup fee ($149.99 and $249.99 respectively). You pay upfront for each plan—either $719.40 per year (the equivalent of $59.95 per month) or $209.85 per quarter (the equivalent of $69.95 per month).
For comparison, LifeStation’s monthly plan for its Sidekick Smart watch costs $43.95 per month. The Medical Guardian MGMove watch has an upfront cost of $199.99 and requires a $39.95-per-month subscription ($36.62 per month if you pay annually), but neither it nor the Sidekick Smart offer fall detection.
The Kanega watch offers generic medicine reminders, but lacks many of the features that you get with the MGMove including a built-in pedometer, as well as a companion app that allows you to send messages to trusted contacts and set reminders for appointments and medications. The My Guardian app for the MGMove also lets people in your support circle monitor your emergency alert events and pinpoint your exact location on a map.
UnaliWear offers a web portal for the Kanega Watch, but all you can do here is enter up to five daily medicine reminders and configure Wi-Fi settings.
Quick Setup, Reasonable Response Times
To prepare the Kanega Watch for first use, you need to charge the batteries for approximately two hours. After you install the batteries in the watch, press the crown button to launch a voice-activated tutorial. The voice prompts tell you how to get the time by asking for it, how to use the help button, and how to test the watch. You also receive an email to schedule an onboarding call with a UnaliWear representative to go over things like how the watch and voice activation works, how emergency dispatch and fall detection features function, where the microphone is, and how to install batteries.
We test response time by clocking how long it takes for a device to connect us with a live response agent after we press the call button. The Kanega Watch took an average of 46 seconds to reach a representative in our tests. That’s a bit slower than the Medical Guardian MGMove (26 seconds) and the LifeStation Sidekick Smart (28 seconds), but that response time is still under a minute, which is good.
The GPS radio was always accurate in testing, and the emergency response agents we spoke with were friendly and professional. Two-way audio sounded clear and adequately loud, too.
Best for Fall Detection and Voice Control
The Kanega Watch is an inconspicuous medical alert device that can connect you to an emergency response agent if you need help, no matter where you are. Fall detection and voice control are its main benefits, but you can set generic medicine reminders via a web portal, too. That said, you don’t get the mobile app and caregiver tools we expect from medical alert devices, and the required subscription is quite pricey. Our Editors’ Choice winner, the Medical Guardian MGMove, is more affordable and offers a better set of features, though it doesn’t detect falls.
