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

27 points by thomasfromcdnjs ↗ HN
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.

13 comments

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Zetobal
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.
PaulHoule
I am a Garmin enthusiast, I have several of them. But they really are for the enthusiast, the Apple Watch would be the way to go for most oeople but my understanding is that it really is a way for Apple to make their phones more sticky.
thomasfromcdnjs
It does seem great, but the battery life seems a bit on the lower range. Three to seven days might be more appropriate for an amnesiac who also might be a bit confused with the nature of charging it.
defrost
Where are we on self winding | automatic wrist worn GPS tagging - something that only checks sat position every 15 minutes or so and only posts positions at a similar frequency should be achievable shouldn't it?

Self winding watches were a thing for quite some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch

ezekg
> Self winding watches were a thing for quite some time.

Definitely still a thing. I'm wearing one right now. :)

Paul-Craft
I actually feel a little silly mentioning this, but there's a post that's active right now about an open source GPS-based pet tracker called FindMyCat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37520039

I wonder if something like this could be adapted to work for this use case? The big problem I see is that a human can just take the damn thing off, and people with dementia are not incredibly reliable or predictable.

jjgreen
Suggest "invite them to live with you".
thomasfromcdnjs
I did, and understand this notion, a complex topic for another day maybe.
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.
Paul-Craft
What do you like about Blink specifically?

I'm looking at wireless/IP cameras that don't need a subscription plan for a little project that's percolating in the back of my head.

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