Medical, Monitoring & Emergency Disclaimer

This Disclaimer is part of our Terms of Service. Lantern exists for the moments a family cares about most — which is exactly why we state its limits as plainly as we can.

1. Not medical advice; not a medical device

Lantern provides general wellness information to support family awareness and conversation. It does not provide medical, nursing, psychological, legal, or financial advice; it is not a medical device; and it has not been evaluated, cleared, or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Nothing in the Service — care records, signals, digests, summaries, trends, or recommendations — is a diagnosis, prognosis, treatment recommendation, or professional assessment of any person’s health, capacity, or safety. Medication features are organizational reminders and family coordination tools, not pharmacy advice; always follow the prescriber’s instructions and consult professionals for decisions about the Elder’s health, care, or living situation — with the Elder in the conversation.

2. Not an emergency or life-safety system

• Lantern is not a personal emergency response system (PERS), medical alert, or certified fall-detection product, and is not a monitored security or life-safety system.
• No person at Lantern watches dashboards, reviews alerts, or dispatches help. There is no call center.
• SOS and escalation features notify the family members your circle configures — reaching them still depends on phones, networks, and people being available. They do not contact 911 for you.
• If a professional monitoring partner is ever offered, it will operate under its own separate terms; until you have expressly enrolled with one, every response depends on your family.
• Fall-related signals (for example from a watch, a bed mat, or motion patterns) are heuristic and incomplete — falls can occur without any signal, and signals can occur without any fall.

3. The honest limitations of signals, calls, and alerts

Passive monitoring and check-in calls have inherent failure modes. Among others:

• Coverage gaps: sensors observe only what they physically can. Normal readings can coexist with a serious problem, and a quiet sensor is not the same thing as a quiet person — a dead battery must never be read as reassurance.
• Hardware and connectivity failures: batteries, unplugged or moved devices, Wi-Fi, internet, phone-network, or platform outages can silently stop data for hours or days.
• Baseline learning: for roughly the first two to four weeks for each Elder, the system is learning that person’s normal patterns; expect limited or suppressed alerts while the baseline forms.
• False positives and negatives: statistical anomaly detection will sometimes flag harmless changes (houseguests, travel, holidays, a moved sensor, a new appliance) and miss real ones.
• Calls can mislead: a missed AI check-in call is not proof something is wrong, and a cheerful answer is not proof everything is fine. Transcription can mishear; AI summaries can be wrong.
• Manual and third-party inputs: medication confirmations, meals, vitals, and check-ins depend on people and platforms recording them accurately and on time.
• Demonstrations: demo features run on fictional personas and simulated data and describe no real person.

4. Your responsibilities as a caregiver

• Keep regular, direct human contact with the Elder — calls, visits, and professional check-ins as their situation warrants. Lantern supplements human care; it never replaces it.
• Keep sensors and devices powered, positioned, and maintained; fix connectivity promptly; treat “device offline” as a to-do, not as information about the Elder.
• Treat signals, digests, and alerts as prompts for human follow-up, not conclusions.
• Escalate concerns to professionals and, where urgent, to emergency services — regardless of what the app shows.

5. Assumption of limitations

By using the Service you acknowledge these limitations and agree that Lantern is not responsible for any harm resulting from reliance on the Service; from missed, delayed, or inaccurate signals, calls, transcriptions, alerts, or insights; or from sensor, device, network, or third-party failures, as further described in the Terms of Service (disclaimers and limitation of liability).