Sensor mats vs radar: choosing a bed exit alarm for aged care

If you manage falls risk in an aged care facility or hospital ward, you've almost certainly used a sensor mat — the pressure-sensitive pad that sits on the bed, in the chair or on the floor and triggers the nurse call when a resident's weight leaves it or lands on it. Sensor mats have been the default bed exit alarm for decades because they're simple, familiar and affordable.

There's now a second option: the radar bed exit sensor — a contactless, ceiling-mounted sensor that watches the whole room. We install and service both across Melbourne, so this isn't a sales pitch for one over the other. It's the comparison we walk through with facilities every week.

How a pressure sensor mat works

A sensor mat is a thin pressure-sensitive pad connected to the nurse call system, placed on the mattress, a chair seat, or the floor beside the bed. When weight is removed (bed or chair mat) or applied (floor mat), it raises a call. That's the whole mechanism — and its simplicity is a genuine strength: staff understand it instantly, it needs no configuration, and a single mat is inexpensive to deploy for one high-risk resident tonight.

Where sensor mats struggle

Ask any facility what their most-replaced piece of equipment is, and sensor mats are usually near the top of the list. The common failure points:

• They're consumables. The pressure membrane wears with use and cleaning chemicals. Most facilities budget to replace mats regularly.
• They drift out of position. A bed mat that slides during linen changes, or a floor mat kicked out of place, silently stops protecting anyone.
• False alarms. Residents shifting their weight in bed can trigger a call — and repeated false alarms train staff to respond slower.
• They get unplugged. During cleaning, bed moves or maintenance — and an unplugged mat looks exactly like a mat with no one on it.
• The alert can come late. A floor mat only triggers once the resident is already standing beside the bed — for an unsteady resident, that can be after the moment that mattered.

How a radar bed exit sensor works

A radar bed exit sensor mounts on the ceiling and monitors the room with low-power 60 GHz millimetre-wave radar — the same sensing technology used in modern cars and smart buildings. It tracks presence, position and posture against a mapped bed zone, with nothing touching the resident or the bed:

• Earlier alerts. It recognises a resident sitting up and leaving the bed — not just their weight landing on the floor.
• Alerts that clear themselves. Back in bed means the call clears — night staff see the exits that matter, not every roll-over.
• Fall detection as a safety net. A genuine fall anywhere in the room — not just beside the bed — raises an emergency call within seconds.
• Nothing to wear, replace or reposition. No membrane to wear out, no pad to slide out of place, no pendant to charge or forget.
• Privacy by design. No camera and no microphone — radar sees movement as a handful of reflected points, never an image. Suitable for bedrooms and bathrooms where cameras are inappropriate.

Like a mat, it delivers its alerts through the nurse call system you already run — display boards, call screens, phones and pagers — so there's no separate app to watch.

Side by side

	Pressure sensor mat	Radar bed exit sensor
Alert timing	When weight leaves the bed mat or lands on the floor mat	As the resident sits up and begins to exit
Fall detection	No — bed exit only	Yes — anywhere in the room, raised as an emergency call
Wear and replacement	Consumable — membranes wear, mats need replacing	No wearing parts in normal use
False alarms	Common — weight shifts, repositioning	Movement-pattern based; sensitivity tuned per room
Failure modes	Slides out of position, gets unplugged — silently	Link-supervised — a sensor that stops responding raises its own fault call
Resident contact	Pad on the bed, chair or floor	Nothing touches the resident or the bed
Up-front cost	Low per mat	Higher per room, no consumables afterwards
Best fit	Single resident, short-term or budget-driven need	Whole rooms or wings, long-term monitoring, falls-focused programs

So which should you choose?

A sensor mat is still the right call when you need protection for one resident tonight, when the need is short-term (post-surgery recovery, a temporary medication change), or when budget rules everything else out. A properly positioned, properly maintained mat is far better than nothing — and we'll keep supplying and installing sensor mats for exactly those cases.

Radar makes more sense when you're equipping rooms for the long term: the recurring cost of replacing mats disappears, the alert comes earlier in the bed exit, falls anywhere in the room are covered as a safety net, and there's nothing for cleaning or maintenance to silently disable. For residents where dignity and privacy are front of mind, contactless monitoring with no camera is often the deciding factor for families.

Whichever way you go, the alerts should arrive through your existing nurse call system — the Sedco, JCT and other systems we service across Melbourne every week — so staff respond to bed exits the same way they respond to every other call.

See both options on your site

We're Melbourne-based and happy to walk your floor: we'll look at your rooms, your residents' needs and your existing nurse call, and give you a straight recommendation — mats where mats make sense, radar where it earns its keep. We can also demonstrate the radar sensor live: map a room in minutes and raise a real emergency call on a demo board in front of you.

Learn about the radar bed exit sensor →
Sensor mats, supplied and installed →
Or call us on 03 7504 7011.