Family, social life, belonging, love, relating to better quality life as grow older.
My Dad is now in a nursing home, and he can't tell the difference between 4 AM and 4 PM when looking at a clock. When he asks his Voice Assistant, and it says, "It's 4 AM", he thinks it said "4 PM," and he better get dressed for dinner!
I have created an Alexa skill called “My Clock” that is designed to help people with dementia who suffer from time “confusion”. And also to help caregivers who get exhausted from answering repeated questions about “what time is it”?
In this solution, I use a paid service that lets me remotely see and control both my Aunt’s PC and her tablet and smartphone.
Helping family members who are technology-adverse, with their technical problems, has always been tough, but becomes even harder when they are remotely located or in an isolated facility. Part of the problem of remote support is “seeing” what they are seeing and “controlling” what they are doing.
The Amazon Fire TV Cube that you set up for your mother, who lives in another state, is sometimes hard for her to use. You wish that you had a way to give her remote help on its usage, other than trying to explain it over the phone.
When my whole family is here, and we want to have an Alexa call with my Aunt who is now in the nursing home, it’s rather cramped sitting around my phone or even my Echo Show
This is about how I took advantage of the ubiquity of TV in the lives of many older adults. By adding various smart integrations, I turned the TV from simply a source of background noise into a useful tool — that helps my 94-yr-old aunt accomplish all sorts of things she previously had trouble with.
Here are two solutions (plus detailed “how to” instructions).
Lutheran SeniorLife, like other senior living communities, needed to quarantine to protect our residents during the COVID pandemic. We needed to develop more creative strategies for connecting our residents and their loved ones. Here is what we did. Window visits became popular and virtual visits exploded. Residents who may have been reluctant to rely on … Read more
Photo credit: Pavan Trikutam How do you have rich and engaging interactions with your parent who you can’t visit in person? Especially if they cannot, or will not, adopt mainstream consumer technologies. That’s the challenge we are exploring in this article. After months of enforced isolation during COVID, video calling as a solution … Read more