I’ve just returned and taken a quick journey to Canada for you to convey my 87-year-old Mom to her home there. She lives by myself in an apartment that has slowly advanced into an area where many seniors live but does not have the designation (or offerings) that a senior dwelling condominium complex might have.
As such, there may be confined safety, no monitoring, no one assigned to test the residents, and no accessibility functions, and it is quite a vintage construction. While my mother changed into touring me, we received a document that her sliding glass door had fallen out onto the balcony and shattered. As it became determined no longer to be the result of a spoil-in, the rental supervisor recommended that it turned into due to “a moving of the constructing.”
Before you ask, allow me to say that I could not persuade my mother to exchange houses or stay with my sister or me. As many senior adults do, she prefers to remain independent.
Having spent the final six weeks with her, I see the need to put a few protection measures in place if she stays in her current residence. Her mind is still sharp; however, she has a few balance troubles and has already “tripped over a blanket” and bruised her ankle quite badly. Because there’s nobody who often tests on the citizens, if she had been to fall and smash a hip, she might lie there for days without assistance.
Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS) use a button that a person can push in case of emergency (some of these structures are also equipped with fall detectors). Medication dishing-out structures can be loaded (by a care provider or family member) with as much as 60 doses of medicine and ship audible reminders to the senior person that it’s time to take their capsules. Even complex domestic tracking systems have facts the off-site caregiver can display online. These structures can alert the caregiver if, for instance, the senior person no longer rises from their mattress earlier than a delegated time.
What about vitamins? How do we understand that our growing older determine or loved one is shopping for AND consuming a nutritionally balanced meal? How can we recognize how long the thawed chook has sat on the counter or the luncheon meats have remained inside the fridge? How do we understand how many senior adults have eaten and what kind of is being tossed in the trash?
How can we recognize that the senior grownup is bathing and engaging in other hygiene activities frequently enough? If mouth care isn’t done regularly enough, oral sickness can occur, which may affect the senior adult’s appetite.
Although generation can alert the off-website caregiver to the number of workouts carried out by the older adult by figuring out movement, exercising can’t be monitored. Senior adults want weight-bearing physical games and activities to help hold their balance, now not just motion. (I’ve observed that my mother has ended up much less cellular since transferring to her own rental. What about scam artists who aim their schemes at older people? Can technology shield them well enough?
Isolation could end up being a problem. Will the use of technology take the region of site visitors who pop in to check that all is properly? (Current robots are being developed to resource the senior person of their day-by-day activities; however, can those robots give hugs?)
The off-website online caregiver may also be negatively affected. What if they are not in a position to reply while the alarm for help is going off? What if the frequency of alarms is excessive? What if the alarms constantly sound at night? Will the off-site caregiver become glued to the home tracking machine? All of those situations can cause elevated stress to both the off-website caregiver and the senior person anticipating a response.
Ultimately, the use of technology can be expensive. Certainly, it’s far less expensive than an assisted living facility or a nursing home; however, do the blessings of keeping the senior person in their home without human help outweigh the probabilities of isolation, terrible nutrition, loss of exercise, viable despair, and uncleanliness?
I bet I’m saying that the generation is a wonderful device to utilize. However, we need to be careful not to allow it to be the major off-website or long-distance caregiving technique.
Shelley Webb has been a registered nurse for nearly 30 years, with experience in neonatal intensive care, dialysis, case-control, and eldercare. When her father came to live with her in 2005, the benefits of her clinical experience became clear. Due to his dementia and congestive heart failure, her father became no longer capable of caring for himself alone, so she took over these duties.
Having skilled the helplessness, frustration, overwhelm, and even loneliness caregiving for a growing older parent brings, Shelley is properly aware of the emotional and educational aid caregivers want. So she started The Intentional Caregiver website. With its weekly newsletter, everyday information updates, and monthly audio interviews of specialists in eldercare and supporting offerings, Shelley strives to encourage and teach caregivers to be empowered to offer quality viable care of themselves while caring for their growing old loved one(s).
