HACKER Q&A
📣 thomasfromcdnjs

How to monitor loved elderly ones in the 21st century?


I have a friend who has a relative that is going through dementia, who also has a heart condition, and also lives rural, if not in mountainous regions.

I would love any and all suggestions as to modern tech that could facilitate;

- GPS

- health monitoring

- notifications

- long battery life

- 4/5g (not bluetooth) (or radio towers etc)

luxury;

- voice calls

- speaker

- configurable

Thanks for any and all answers.

  👤 Zetobal Accepted Answer ✓
apple watch ultra. nothing beats it in terms of usability especially for older people. There are garmins and even purpose build toys. The Garmins are not as user friendly and the toys are just that.
👤 jjgreen
Suggest "invite them to live with you".
👤 JakeTehPwner
A Garmin watch is probably your best bet outside of one of those life alert type or similar devices. There’s a “kids” one with LTE and texting that might work well too. I think the subscription is $5/m. They have a more advanced LTE+GPS watch as well but it’s more expensive. You can have them share their heart rate and other data, and the battery life is amazing.

Edit: they have emergency support and location sharing too.

👤 evolve2k
I’ve previously worked on an assisted living smart home system, it was basically independent living apartments used in the final months of recovery following a major physical trauma.

The most useful and elegant measure ended up being a sensor that notified when they got out of bed.

While there’s lots of ways to track both crisis events (emergency buttons, call detection watches etc) and on-demand surveillance, many don’t provide very good day on day metrics.

There’s lots more that can be tracked but for passive notifications, knowing they got up each day, and if this started changing, is a really elegant basic measure.

👤 mud_dauber
We use Blink cameras tied to the parents' house WiFi.