Connie Araps, 57, of Delray Beach, Fla., thought that her father, Tom Araps, 87, was managing just fine on his own. But when he came to stay with her for a few months in 2005, she found that he was skipping meals, sleeping all morning and not taking daily walks.
To satisfy her father’s desire to live alone, but to ease her mind about his safety, Ms. Araps found an apartment for him less than a mile from her home and had it equipped with
QuietCare, a home health alarm system provided by ADT Security Services.
She drops by his apartment often, and logs into a Web site several times a day to check on him. Motion sensors track how often Mr. Araps opens the refrigerator, when he gets out of bed and how long he stays in the bathroom. If his normal patterns vary, the alarm company alerts her.
One day, the company called her to say that no one had entered or left the apartment all day. It turned out that a home health aide had failed to show up, and her father had not received his diabetes medication. Ms. Araps rushed over and made sure that her father took his pills.
“We are so pleased with all the technology,” she said. “I don’t think we would have let him live alone without it.” On the market since August, the QuietCare system costs $199 to install, and monitoring starts at $79.95 a month. In addition to the QuietCare system, Ms. Araps had the alarm company install video cameras showing the floors and the foot of her father’s bed, so she could see if he had fallen.
About 19 million Americans, aside from paid providers, are caring for someone over the age of 75, according to the National Alliance for Caregiving. With the number of older Americans growing rapidly, products and services to help adult children care for their parents are on the rise.
Some products, like QuietCare, use existing alarm technology. Other systems collect health information like blood pressure, weight and medication use and transmit it to adult children or other care providers via the Web. In addition, the emerging profession of geriatric care management is making it possible for family members to delegate various care duties.
Nursing homes have been using health alarm systems like QuietCare for several years, and a few allow family members to view data remotely. “I have a button on my browser that says, ‘Where’s Pop,’ ” said Barry Jacobson, 61, whose 83-year-old father has Alzheimer’s disease and lives at Oatfield Estates, a retirement community in Milwaukie, Ore.
Mr. Jacobson, who lives 300 miles away on San Juan Island off the coast of Washington, can log on at any time to see his father’s whereabouts. Because all residents and staff wear badges that emit a digital signal, he can tell exactly where his father is and who else is in the room.
“My sister in San Diego logged on at midnight one night and saw he was in the kitchen,” he said. “He always was a big ice cream eater.” Elite Care, the company that owns Oatfield Estates, plans to introduce a home version of its technology this year.
Mr. Jacobson knows that a staff of care providers is monitoring his father’s data, ready to respond instantly to problems. The level of responsiveness varies, however, with home-based monitoring systems.
Potential buyers “need to do their due diligence on companies to make sure they have the capacity on the other end to respond to the information,” said Robyn I. Stone, executive director of the Institute for the Future of Aging Services, the research arm of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.
QuietCare uses a 24-hour call center staffed with operators trained to help the elderly in emergencies. Family care providers define emergency situations — a parent staying in the bathroom for more than an hour, for example, or not opening the medicine cabinet all day. They instruct the system when and whom to call, or to send a text or e-mail message.
Another system, SeniorSafe@Home, to be introduced in the fall, will staff its call center with nurses who will monitor data from a combination of motion sensors, electronic medication dispensers and fall detectors.
A system called iCare Health Monitoring uses a very different model. It is not meant to serve as an emergency alarm system. Instead, it tries to prevent emergencies by allowing care providers, family members and older people themselves keep track of specific health data, like
blood pressure, weight or medications use. Nurses monitor the system, but not around the clock.
Using a small electronic device with a text screen and four input buttons, the system asks a series of daily multiple-choice questions about an older person’s health. Family members or other care providers can view the answers online and look for any telltale changes in health. Available through
http://www.cvs.com/ and some CVS pharmacy stores since July, the system costs $99 to install and $49.95 a month for monitoring.
Alberta Jackson, 78, of Aurora, Colo., who has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, uses iCare to track her lung function every day. She spends about eight minutes a day answering questions. Once when she responded that she was not feeling well, a nurse called within minutes to check on her.
“It makes me feel like there’s somebody on my shoulder, making sure I’m O.K.,” Mrs. Jackson said.
Of course, not everyone wants someone looking over their shoulder. “There are privacy and ethical issues,” Ms. Stone said. “Where’s the line between motion sensors and Big Brother?”
Verne Biehl, 79, first learned to play the piano when he was 12 years old, but he took lessons only a year and later regretted not being able to play well.
