Simple Ways to Video Chat With Elderly Parents in Senior Care
The pandemic has been rough on everyone, especially when it comes to maintaining connection with the people we love. Luckily, technology allows us to maintain these connections in all sorts of useful ways, including chats, game nights, and video calls. It can be especially challenging, however, when you’re trying to stay in touch with someone who isn’t as technologically savvy or is otherwise limited because of age or circumstance.
The Challenges of Senior Care Facilities
When moving a family member into a senior home care, you may need a method to setup remote video conference with them ahead of time. This is often necessary because any technology would have to be pre-programmed ahead of time as all the facility would do is plug into the power but they would not do anything else due to the many policies in place. Furthermore, the recipient would not be cognitive enough to know and push on the tablet. Whatever technological setup you’re going to use to connect is going to have to be something that’s absurdly easy to operate.
Evaluating Potential Devices
Since the senior-care facility workers won’t mess with a device for you, and will only really plug it in, we have to rule out any kind of laptop-based setup. Someone would have to turn those on, after all, and I doubt they’re going to want to keep a laptop running 24/7. Additionally, if something goes wrong with any of these devices, the facility workers would have to help troubleshoot, which it sounds like they wouldn’t be comfortable doing. You could set up and angle a smartphone to face your mom and just dial in to that, but that’s an awfully small picture to deal with. A tablet would be better, but there’s an even better solution: purchase a smart display, such as Google’s Nest Hub Max.
Comparison of Communication Devices
| Device Type | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Laptop | Large screen for visibility. | Requires manual power-on; difficult for facility staff to troubleshoot. |
| Smartphone | Easy to position. | Small picture; difficult for elderly users to see. |
| Smart Display | Foolproof; self-sufficient; updates itself; easy troubleshooting. | Requires specific account setup and initial Wi-Fi connection. |
Why Smart Displays are the Ideal Solution
Smart displays are pretty foolproof. Once you plug one in and set it up, it’s going to be fairly self-sufficient; it’ll update itself as needed, reconnect to the internet if it ever goes down, and the most troubleshooting it’ll probably ever need is a quick unplug and plugging back in. That fits exactly what the facility workers would be able to do, should the need arise.
Setting Up the Remote Connection
When you go to set up the smart display before dropping it off at the facility, you’ll need to have some kind of phone number to associate with it—well, with Google Duo, technically. You’ll probably want to make a new, dummy Google account for all of this, append a Google Voice phone number, and then add your primary Google account as a member of the household so you can control the smart display from afar. Also, maybe as part of the drop-off process, you can plug the display in near enough to the facility that you’ll be able to set it up on their wifi. That’s the key part of this whole process.
Methods to Launch Video Chats
You then have two options to launch video chats—assuming the resident isn’t capable of answering them herself:
- Google Home Routines: You can make a routine in the Google Home app for your mom’s account that calls your personal phone number when activated.
- Live Feed Monitoring: You can also use the built-in “Camera” feature within the Google Home app to pull up a live feed from the smart display and talk to it.
I like the Google Duo approach myself, as I think it’s a more elegant solution. It might seem a little backwards to use a separate device to initiate a call from your mother’s smart display, but that’s the best solution for maintaining a visual connection remotely.