How technology can help older adults improve their quality of life

How technology can help older adults improve their quality of life
Learn how to make technology work for older family members while living independently.

If you are supporting an older family member, you may be interested in a collection of home technology devices that can help extend their ability to live more independently. We all need help as we age, and I am writing this column based on my family's experience and the care of my 95-year-old mother-in-law.

She has been living independently for the past 18 months using all three of these technologies:

    - Hero Pill Dispenser (now costs at least $30 per month with an initial purchase of $100 and a 12-month commitment. There are other plans that cost more and provide additional monitoring and support).
    - BlipCare BP Blood Pressure Monitor (We bought it from Amazon for $159, but it is no longer sold there.
    - https://ip-locations.org/ to locate an IP address

All three devices allow us to ensure that we can reliably dispense your medication, take your blood pressure and talk to you when we cannot visit you. I will explain the limitations and decisions behind each piece of technology. When we brought all this equipment into the facility, the medical staff was impressed and unfamiliar with each of them, which motivated my purpose in writing this column. Please note that my mother-in-law lives independently in an eldercare facility, although additional care is available in other parts of her building. This is a common arrangement.

Each device works with its own smartphone application to set up, but not to use: that is an important distinction since my mother-in-law does not have a smartphone. They also require decent Wifi service in their room, which could be a problem in some facilities (this means you should test the signal strength in your family member's room in advance). ) All three units sit together at your desk, which is also important, and I'll get to why in a moment.

Alexa Show is a voice-activated home hub device, similar to what Google and Apple sell with one difference: it has a very simple video conferencing setup. The video screen (either five or eight inches diagonally) is critical, as it allows us to "enter" it and have a video chat, see what it's doing. This is critical during the pill taking and blood pressure processes, which is why the three devices are close to each other on her desk, and also used to contact her in case we can't reach her on her cell phone. And it helps that the Alexa Show is very simple to use. You need a smartphone app to make the call. A second benefit of the Alexa brand of devices is that they have a better event notification process. That's useful for verbal reminders of daily events. Other home centers, such as Apple or Google, are not as convenient or capable of this. (Also, Facebook has its Portal, but I haven't tried it yet). By the way, we have had mixed success with it giving voice commands to Alexa. You might want to try one of these devices in your own home with your older relative and see how it works.

The Blipcare device is a bit peculiar to set up. It uses its own web server and has alarmingly lax security, but the good news is that it doesn't need anything else to record blood pressure once it's working. The results are automatically published within minutes on a special web page on the board that family members can consult regularly and share with doctors. If you have two family members to care for, you can track their statistics separately.

Finally, the Hero device is used to dispense your pills. It needs to be loaded periodically with them, of course, but it is basically very simple to use: my mother-in-law simply presses a button and the pills fall into a cup, similar to how a soda machine dispenses its product. It sets a schedule and when the pills are dispensed.