Are you struggling with how to care for aging parents while being a full time mom, dad, or employee? Balancing your own responsibilities while caring for your parents can be a monumental challenge.
Perhaps you live in another city, you’re spread too thin with commitments to your own career or kids, your parents are self-isolating, or you just don’t get along.
Regardless of the reason, there are a host of new technologies that are revolutionizing caregiving, allowing you to ensure your parents safety, health, and happiness without having to be physically present.
Here are 5 easy ways to care for your aging parents from a distance:
1. Stay connected
As our parents get older, many lose their best friends, family, and loved ones to age, leaving them exposed to the dangers of isolation and loneliness. Fortunately, it’s never been easier, or cheaper, to stay connected from afar. Whether through phone, text, or video, you can speak with your parents every day, no matter where you are.
2. Set up deliveries
As our parents age, many will lose the ability to drive or have mobility or vision issues, making shopping on their own virtually impossible. Making sure your parents have groceries, meals, medications, and household items is critical.
In the past, you’d have to go shopping for your parents, maybe even cook them their meals if they couldn’t do it themselves. Now, you can simply set up delivery.
To help ease the burden of shopping for your parents, set up home delivery for their groceries. You can do the same for their medications from their local or online pharmacy and make sure they come sorted by day in convenient pill packs.
3. Organize access to help
Falls are the number one cause of injuries to older adults. They cause more fatalities, head trauma, and broken hips than any other source of injury. Knowing your parents can get help, even when they’re injured and alone, is key to their independence and your peace of mind.
Older adults can now access life alert systems that protect them in and outside their home, use GPS, and have automatic fall detection.
4. Consider smart home management
As seniors age, poor vision, mobility, and manual dexterity can make many routine tasks become anything but routine. Fortunately, many new smart home technologies, like digital voice assistants (Amazon Alexa or Google Home, for example), are dramatically facilitating routine tasks.
For example, seniors with poor visibility can now turn on their TV and change channels from the digital voice assistant. Your parents can also call you with a simple voice command without having to fumble through a phone book or tiny keypad.
5. Install home security
Seniors tend to be more vulnerable to theft, abuse, and exploitation than the rest of the population. Social isolation, cognitive decline, impaired mobility, poor vision, and increased trustworthiness all tend to make older adults prime targets, not only from strangers, but even more so from caregivers and family members.
Fortunately, there are several things you can do to keep a watchful eye over those coming into contact with your parents. First of all, you can install a video doorbell. Doing so will allow you to see who’s at your parents’ door and when.
