In a new report Carers UK has called for a technological transformation to support families caring for ill, frail and disabled loved ones. Care and technology in the 21st century argues that the way families already use technology to work, plan their lives, shop and socialize should also be reflected in how they care for ill, frail or disabled loved ones.
The report also launches a new partnership, Connect: Toolkits for Assisted Living, between the charity and partners, including Microsoft. Press release for report and more information.
As it happens, editor Steve was sent the other day an example of just how telecare technology can support carers by adapting to their lifestyles rather than forcing the carer to adapt to the technology. The correspondent wrote “At InMezzo, we believe that comprehensive telecare should be able to cope with all the channels, enabling use in the widest possible circumstances. But there is a particularly useful feature of mobile use in our ‘Just a Minute’ dementia carer respite service (brochure PDF) That is, a carer can take a break from the stress of continuous supervision to pop out to the shops, or for other reasons. They can switch on the in-home monitoring service and link it to their mobile phone. Any incident will raise an alert (e.g. by text message) and then they can switch into video mode and see what is happening and talk to their charge, before deciding what to do.”
an alert to raise awareness to an incident? Switching to video mode sounds like the best solution to connect with an online doctor and have the problem solved as fast as possible. The response time of such technology will save lives. such technology will save lives.