How an iPhone and some technology help me with my father’s Alzheimer’s

My father has Alzheimer’s. I had been noticing it for a few years, but medical tests diagnosed it with certainty some time ago.

As a degenerative disease that it is, it is advancing and my father’s brain is diminishing in capacity. Fortunately, until now he is quite autonomous, and the things he usually does, he continues to do (he drives the usual routes, cooks simple things, does the laundry, shops, irons, goes out to the bar to talk with people and drink his coffee… normal activities that we do any).

However, in the part of learning or logic he no longer works well. He is not capable of learning new things, or relating simple concepts. This, which might seem unimportant, greatly complicates the taking of medicines, especially when they change. It also makes it impossible for him to understand how a mobile or a television remote works.

Since I don’t live with him, and until the time comes for him to come live with us, I have used some technology to be able to attend to him and, above all, understand what he explains to me “in his way”, remotely.

I have looked for cheap but functional solutions to solve the following problems:

• Locate my father always.
• Locate his bag with his things (house keys, glasses, wallet, etc).
• See my father in his house, through the different rooms.
• That my father can call me from his cell phone without using the contacts.
• That my father can know what pills he has to take according to the time of day

Locate my father and his things

Before, my father used a Xiaomi Android phone which he understood a few things about. Through Google and his account, I could geo-locate him whenever he wanted, but I had to enter his account from a browser to do so. On the other hand, since many times I didn’t know where he left her bag around his house, I bought him some Tile devices to locate nearby objects via bluetooth, which also tell you the last known position (in case he left it somewhere).

I had two problems with this configuration: the hassle of locating my father through a web browser and that the Xiaomi disconnected the bluetooth when it felt like it, not being able to locate the objects.

Since I am an iPhone user, because I love the simplicity of iOS, I exchanged the phone for a second-hand, cheap and functional iPhone 6S, knowing that:

• Any problem with the phone is solved by buying another one, since the iOS backup allows you to recover all the settings of the phone from the cloud. In this way, nothing would change for my father in the future, it would always be the same phone.
• The integration of iOS with my own iPhone makes it easy for me to locate my father in the easiest way in the world.
• Siri could help me with vocal commands (Google too, but not to the level I intended to use it).

So, after configuring the iPhone to the most basic possible (here Apple could create a special configuration that would simplify the whole system even more, such as the contacts, which my father is not able to understand), the first thing I did was to allow the track his iPhone from my account, so that it shows up whenever I look for him in the iOS “Find My” app. In this way, now I only have to say “Hey Siri, where is dad” and, automatically, his position appears on a map, without having to do anything else. First problem, fixed.

“Find My” app and “Tile” app

The second problem was solved only by switching to the iPhone, because the bluetooth never failed again, so I always have my father’s bag located. The application has already helped me several times to find it around the house, because my father had left it somewhere unusual and he couldn’t find it.

See my father

The third problem, seeing my father and what he was doing, I solved by buying some cameras with remote control. In my case, a DLink Full HD with a turntable, speakers/microphone and night vision. This fixed several issues at once:

• It allows me to see my father at any time.
• I can talk to him live, walkie-talkie style.
• When he calls me to explain something “in his language” (because, unfortunately, he has lost vocabulary or calls one thing by the name of another), I look at the camera and see what he means.
• When he wants me to put the football on TV, I show him step by step which TV remote to take (the one for the TV or the one for the decoder), which menu he has to go to to switch from TV to HDMI, and which channel he has to put at the end in the decoder). This may seem silly, but doing it without seeing what he was doing on screen was very difficult. I got to spend 30 minutes on the phone to get it on without the cameras. Now I do it in 1 minute or 2, at the most. You have to keep in mind that he doesn’t understand the buttons on the controls, if you tell him to “push it up” he doesn’t know what you mean, and when he hits it, sometimes he doesn’t point at the TV and doesn’t get to the menu where he should be (in your plan formed in your head).

Siri and iOS shortcuts to the rescue

Create a list of Favorites to call

The fourth problem started to occur recently: he no longer understands how the iPhone contacts works. He knows that all his friends are there, but he doesn’t know how to use it to call any of them (which, basically, is to click on the name and then on the phone icon or on the phone number). My first option was to add a Shortcut with the favorites so that I only had to click on “Speed dial” and then the person. It worked, but it limited him to calling only the people on that list.

Finally, I realized that I used the “Hey Siri, call dad” option a lot, so I taught him how to call with Siri. It worked the first afternoon, the next day he couldn’t remember, so I stuck a label on the back of the phone with the phrase “Hey Siri, call …” and that’s how I got him to always call with Siri. Now he knows that he can call any name in the contacts, so “…call Carlos” or “…call Maria” allows him to call his friends without having to use the contacts at all.

Finally, the fifth problem, the issue of the daily pills he takes, some in the morning and others at night, and which at first he took perfectly, also ended up getting complicated. He no longer knows which ones eat and when, even if it is written on a piece of paper: “in the morning: this and that, at night, so and so”. Too many instructions to process by himself and blocks. The obvious solution is that he called me every day to ask me, when he got up and after dinner. The only problem was that if I wasn’t reachable for some reason, he got nervous.

Shortcut to indicate the pills

I then remembered the topic of iOS Shortcuts, again: it is possible to program almost anything with Shortcuts. So, I started to see how I could make a shortcut that, either in the morning (before 12), or at night, would indicate the correct pills to take. Then, you just had to name it something that Siri can understand for it to run. And so it was: “Hey Siri, what pills do I have to take”. From that moment on, and to my father’s astonishment (I had to convince him that this “machine” is never going to be wrong and will always tell him the same thing as me), every time he asks to the phone, it tells him correctly what have to take. The phrase, obviously, is written on paper.

Conclusions

Technology can help you a lot with these situations. It is possible that, in the Google ecosystem on Android, the same thing could be done (or almost, the iOS Shortcuts are wonderful as they are integrated with Siri, so that my father does not have to interact with a graphical interface, but simply talk), but of course, having everything integrated between my iPhone and him (looking for my father, his things with Tile, although I could also be using Airtags, but he already had the Tiles bought) and having Siri always available to my father is making his life easier as an autonomous person.

We’ll stretch that autonomy as far as we can, as long as it’s safe. He is happy to remain autonomous, within his possibilities. Of not feeling like a burden to anyone, of being able to do things for himself.

And that’s very important because as soon as he stops doing things, that part of his brain will disappear and never come back. For this reason, and this is how their doctors also communicate it to me, it is important that we stretch their autonomy as much as possible.

Finally, the cost of the technology that I have used, in case it serves someone as a reference, is as follows:

• Second-hand iPhone 6S but with a 2-year warranty: 120€
• Two Tile devices: 20€ each.
• Four surveillance cameras: 50€ each.

In total, 360€ in devices. It is little, very little, compared to the help that they are giving me.