They sound like a real life version of Robot and Frank: Robot & Frank (2012) - IMDb
Maybe show them that movie and they’d be more open to having a robot butler…
The couple are a husband-wife team of the same age. Each has POA for the other.
IMHO, they are way past the age and capability to handle things like finances, but he enjoys keeping track of stocks and other investments and is reluctant to give up that power or task.
One of the daughters is due to arrive tomorrow and stay for a few weeks. I will go over the options suggested here and see what she thinks. Thanks to everyone for the tips and advice.
Heh, I can totally believe that. Tech isn’t for everyone!
My mom was a nerd who helped me build PCs. My dad, on the other hand, never figured out how to change a light bulb or set a digital alarm clock. For the first thirty years after email became widely available, he was so scared of it he would handwrite all his letters, fax them to his secretary, and have her type them up and email them. The man was a nuclear engineer. I guess he just preferred the abacus. Shrug.
Good luck! Hopefully she can someday soon convince them to get more human assistance. A thoughtful caretaker is going to be way better than any of these hacky gadgets.
Sort of a curious choice, if both are of a similar level of capacity. Gonna have to ponder a bit over the need for H/W to have POA for each other.
But good luck in finding something that works for your friends.
Even absent any sort of dementia or Alzheimer’s diagnosis, I have noticed that my parents’ mental faculties are not as sharp as they once were. (For one example, my mother can’t remember how to make certain dishes that she’s made hundreds or thousands of times previously without ever using a written recipe.)
This says it can be programmed remotely. I someone can do the initial setup, then others can remotely enter in the appointments etc.
StG
That’s really cool! Just tagging @Musicat to make sure they see it.
My now 93-year-old mother developed that same ineffective style of trying to communicate with a computer/phone about 5 years ago. It was comical, but also sad, to watch.
It made her very frustrated, as one can imagine.
She’s not gotten better at it, and so she mostly does not even try any more.
She has agreed to go to assisted living in about a month.
The Smart Clock shown by @StGermain looks like it might do the trick. I have to pick up one of the daughters at the airport tomorrow for a short visit, and when the dust settles, we certainly will look into that. Quite a pricey object, though, at $275.
I like the option to connect by a local internet – that will work. Connecting by phone isn’t as good – they have trouble hanging up the phones in the house, so phones are often off hook for many hours at a time, and attempting to use a cellphone is not reliable where we live. Cellphone reception is quite iffy in this rural location.
A lot cheaper than assisted living, though.
StG
Given its capabilities, this looks like a decent price to me.
I assume you mean Wi-Fi in their house? The other option is via mobile connection, at 99 bucks a year, and you say that cellphone reception is iffy.
Yes, I mean Wi-Fi in the house. Just a nitpick, tho – a local internet connection isn’t necessarily WiFi. It can be a wired Ethernet, as some are in my house.
I’ll see what Number One Daughter says.
Could you try a google nest hub? The default screen is a clock. Also you could have other people program in alarms if they share a google account.
https://store.google.com/product/nest_hub_2nd_gen?hl=en-US&pli=1
Right, except the specs for this device call for WiFi. If it’s already installed in the house, you’re good to go.
Yup, this is explicitly a wifi or cellular device, no physical connection is available. Which to my mind is for the best. A physical cable can be broken or disconnected by a confused senior. I would expect wireless setting on this device would be deliberately made difficult to unintentionally change.
Now I have a small concern about its charging situation. Based on my experience caring for my father who had one flavor of dementia or another, you can’t count on these folks to connect this device when the battery gets low. I’d recommend mounting a tablet like this in some way that it can’t effectively be moved or unplugged.
I’m not following what you mean when you mention ‘connecting by phone’. If you mean this couple cannot often be contacted by phone, this device seems idea in that it’s always ready to receive a video call from a family member or caregiver with the app.
If you mean connecting in the sense of connecting to this device, well no. Remote family and caregivers use the app on their cellphones to connect with the tablet. The elderly couple’s home phone system has nothing to do with it, regardless of whether they remembered to hang up or not.
Last, and I feel like a nag here, but I gotta say that given all the challenges you’ve mentioned they’re having, right up to not reliably being able to hang up the phone, these folks are past their days of living independently.
In a very similar situation, my family (me included) waited too long to intervene with my stubbornly resistant grandparents, leading to two ugly, very unpleasant deaths, both of which did not have to happen when or how they did. The fallout from that situation really had a terrible impact on my mother’s last few years of life as she had unmanageable guilt about the situation. And it changed the way my sister and I dealt with my declining father after my mother passed. We were firm with him in ways that I don’t think I could have mustered before, but in the end, he had a last few years of comfortable living that he probably wouldn’t have had if we’d let him stay in his house.
Sorry for the soapbox. I’ve just seen this exact situation go as wrong as it could and I’m still bothered by what I saw and had to do.
Sorry you had to watch your family go through that.
It seems a small step from forgetting to hang up a phone to forgetting to turn off a burner…
We’ve got multiple couples in our church who’ve checked into a retirement home long before they need to. I’m so impressed with that.
Sounds like an Alexa device would work. There are severall screen sizes and there are always deals.
and can be run from elsewhere. Likely used ones around
You can schedule appointments on an Echo Show by linking your Google, Outlook, or Apple calendar in the Alexa app, then use voice commands like, “Alexa, schedule a dentist appointment on my Google calendar for November 18th at 2 p.m.” or simply “Alexa, add a reminder to call Mom tomorrow at 10 AM,” with appointments appearing visually on the Show’s screen once se