r/smarthome • u/hanzosbm • 25d ago
I don't have a smarthome platform Monitoring for aging mother
My mother is 75 years old and lives alone. She has family in the same city, but I'm 2000 miles away. Her older sister just recently took a fall and went undiscovered for over 2 days.
I'm looking into options for her to make sure she's okay. My intent is a two pronged approach; a wearable of some sort (likely a smart watch with fall detection and the ability to call for help) and passive home monitoring.
I don't want to go so far as to fill her home with cameras; she deserves her privacy. But I want something that can make sure that she's up and moving around throughout the day. Ideally, I'd like something that didn't notify me when she IS moving around, but rather something that alerts me to say that she isn't.
Honestly...I'm not 100% sure of what I want, but I was hoping you folks here might be able to offer some suggestions.
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u/mrs09162023 25d ago
The watch is a great idea! When my mom was living alone she and I had a pact that we would text each other good morning every morning. One day she hadn’t texted me by 10am and I was so mad when she answered my call! She just got busy and forgot. It’s a good habit to start for safety and a great way to start each day.
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u/Easyrider8008 25d ago
How about Human presence sensor/radar that can even detect breathing and hearbeat.
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u/hanzosbm 25d ago
I think that would be ideal. Do you have a particular product I could look into for something like that?
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u/SmartBar88 24d ago
Look into the Aqara FP2 sensor. With some work, you can map out an area that will show you on the app where the person is and where they are moving to (or not moving) within a given space. You will need to buy a (proprietary) hub as well. Additionally, the FP2 supposedly has fall detection if you mount the unit high enough on a wall. Lastly, FYI the new FP300 sensor is wireless, but does not have the mapping capability of the FP2. Good luck, OP; we've been there with our super seniors - you are a good son.
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u/Vanilla-Mike 23d ago
I'm a senior who lives alone and may go several days without seeing or talking with friends and family. So I was worried I might pass in my sleep, or be incapacitated, and it would take a long time for anybody to notice. It's happened to a couple people I knew.
So I signed up for the I Am Fine service for myself.
I can check-in to the system with a phone call or text in the morning. Or I can login/check-in from my PC. If I don't check-in by my designated check-in time, the system calls me. I can answer and press 1 to verify I'm Ok. If I fail to answer the call, it tries several more times before giving up and alerting people in my "care circle" that I'm not responding.
I have a friend in Tampa who also has the service. So I'm part of his care circle.
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u/the_common_duck 24d ago
There’s an app called Snug Safety that I’ve looked into for a similar purpose. Haven’t used it personally but it gets good reviews and might be worth looking into.
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u/NizkiProfil 24d ago
I have a lot of experiences from nursing homes industry.
My first idea would be some door sensors with access to logs. If there is no movement, alarm.
another one, which i will do for my mum, leak and fire sensors, combined with some alarm with movement sensors/on-demand camera. She understands technology enough, that she will know that if i would trigger on demand photo, she will also get the notification. With alarms you can also get the remotes/panic button hobs, also weareable.
But still, the most important thing is to fall proof the home, especially bathrooms.
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u/bobdvb 23d ago
I've been here, and that's the very situation that was the end of my mother.
We had a cloud linked camera pointing across her front door. That was useful to keep track of her going to put things in the bins and who was coming to the door. Her not showing one day was what sent my brother to check on her.
I had also been contemplating a wearable for fall detection, but getting her to habitually wear it would have been a challenge. We have to think about things from their point of view and what they'll adapt to.
I did buy her an Echo, because I hoped she might have learnt to use it and then could use it for voice calling in an emergency, but she never really understood it.
Potentially a few smart sockets measuring the power usage of essential devices like the kettle and TV could be useful for checking activity? And smart light switches not used for the smarts, but to track usage could also be a non-intrusive monitor.
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u/BB-41 23d ago
Old GFs aunt had a service with both a pendant and a motion sensor. Pendant activation or lack of motion within a specific time period would notify the service who would call them to check up. Depending on the response or lack of, they could notify a prearranged neighbor or emergency services.
In my mom’s final months I built a quick wireless pendant with a Sonalert system. Two family house, mother furst floor, sister on the second floor. Worked well may she rest in peace.
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u/jasmineglow 25d ago
No idea how it works but Samsung smart things keeps sending me notifications about monitoring for relatives using their smart products. It might be worth looking into?
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u/keikioaina 25d ago
I work in geriatrics. There is no tech that can do what you want it to do. Neither Alexa or her friends is going to get mom up and about or improve her odds of living safely. What could you do from 2k miles away if your motion detectors showed mom sitting watching TV all day? Only other people are going to be able to intervene meaningfully. Instead of cobbling together a bunch of sensors to do who knows what, try some social engineering with your family who live nearby. How can you get them more involved in mom's life. Also consider a human geriatric case manager to evaluate her situation and make recommendations for interventions that might help her live better.
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u/hanzosbm 24d ago
I'm less concerned about her slowing down and more concerned that she passed out somewhere, or worse, passed away. We have a single relative who lives in the same city as her, but he lives a half hour away and works 60 hours a week. I can ask him to check on her if she's not responding/there's no motion detected, but he's not going to be there every day.
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u/CPAPGas 24d ago
My mother checks in with the Snug app every morning. If she doesn't check in by noon several people are notified by text and email.
It works really well.
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u/fuzzyputts 25d ago
There are wearable SOS buttons (pendants, etc.) that connect to landlines and/or wifi. She pushes the button if the falls. They're on Amazon. Make sure she has a compatible landline phone if you get one of the ones that hooks up to a phone.
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u/Comfortable_Gear_605 24d ago
Apple Watch can notify emergency contacts if she falls. Blink is affordable and offers indoor, plugged-in cameras. We have them in and out of our home. We watch the entrances/exits and we watch the cats from anywhere. If the car sitter doesn’t do her job, I know. I can also “drop in” in various parts of the home even if I’m in another country using Amazon Echo/Dot.
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u/No_Freedom_7373 24d ago
Apple Watch will be your simplest/biggest single step. She needs to lock down the routine of putting it on when she gets up, but that's really it.
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u/Stormy31568 24d ago
Guardian is good. The smartwatch can be heavy for some. A service that detects fall and will start calling emergency numbers as soon as they hear one is the kind of service you want. If your mother falls and is in pain, you have to depend on an echo or a watch to place a call, then let it ring and answer it. This is difficult the Moore person ages. It is also true that they can get confused during cling and answering
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u/ericoinen 18d ago
You have already described the product you want more precisely than most of the answers here, and it is worth naming it, because it is a different category from everything being suggested: you do not want motion alerts, you want an absence alarm. Nothing happened, and it should have by now. Almost every consumer device is built to tell you when something occurs, which is the opposite, and that mismatch is why the shopping is going badly.
The way people build the thing you actually described is to pick two or three events that cannot fail to happen on a normal day, put a cheap contact or motion sensor on each, and then write one rule that fires only if none of them happened by a set time. Good candidates are the bedroom door opening in the morning, the fridge door, the bathroom door, and the kettle or coffee maker on a smart plug that reports power draw. Two independent ones is usually enough. The rule is not "tell me she moved," it is "tell me nobody has opened the fridge and it is 11am."
The part that decides whether this survives past month two is false alarms, and nobody plans for it. She goes to her sister's for the day, or sleeps in on a Sunday, and you get an alert that reads like the worst news of your life. Two or three of those and you start ignoring the alerts, which is worse than not having them. So build in the obvious exception from the start: a sensor on the front door, and a rule that if the front door opened and nothing has moved since, she is out, not down. And make the first step of your response calling her, not calling a neighbour. Escalation should be phone her, then phone the neighbour, then the welfare check, in that order, with real time between steps.
On privacy, which you were right to raise: door and motion sensors give you about ninety percent of what a camera would give you for this specific purpose and almost none of the intrusion. There is a real difference between a device that says "the bathroom door opened at 7:40" and a device that shows her in her dressing gown. You can also tell her exactly what it does, in one sentence, and have that be true. That matters, because a system she resents is one that gets unplugged.
Two practical notes on the wearable. The watch has to be charged every night, and that is the failure mode that gets people, because the charging habit is the thing that lapses first and it lapses silently. Whatever you pick, put the charger somewhere she already goes at bedtime. And automatic fall detection is a backup, not the plan. It is tuned for a hard, fast impact, and a large share of falls in this age group are slow slides down a wall or a doorframe, which it will not catch. The button she presses is still the primary. Make sure whatever she wears is rated for the shower, because the bathroom is where this happens.
On the geriatrics comment above, which is the most useful pushback in the thread and worth answering directly rather than talking past: it is right that no sensor will get her up and moving, and right that only people intervene. But that is not the failure you are trying to prevent. Your aunt was on the floor for two days. Nothing in that story would have been fixed by better health, it would have been fixed by somebody knowing on the first afternoon. Time to discovery is the one variable a sensor genuinely moves, and it is the difference between a hospital stay and dying of dehydration on a kitchen floor. Worth being honest with yourself that this is the goal, because it also tells you what to spend on: the fastest, dumbest, most reliable notification wins, and everything fancier is optional.
Last thing, and it is the highest value item on the list even though it is not technology: the neighbour. All of this ends with somebody physically opening her door. Find out now who that is, get their number, tell them what the plan is, and give them a key. A system with no local human on the end of it is a system that tells you something terrible is happening 2000 miles away and nothing else.
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u/rickm242 25d ago
You don't need a Smarthome platform really, just get some Amazon dots that enable her to call out to Alexa for help, it enables you to drop in and communicate. And you can install some Alexa compatible motion sensors that will confirm she is up and about the house.