GrandCare Showcased at Innovative LeadingAge MN Conference

GrandCare, the industry leader in comprehensive eldercare technology, will be featured at the LeadingAge Minnesota conference in St. Paul tomorrow, February 10. The mission of LeadingAge Minnesota is an important one: ensuring that “older adults in every community live with dignity, meaning, and purpose.” GrandCare will be at the conference in booth 257 to help deliver on that mission.

How? By introducing new and innovative functionality like the Emergency Broadcast Alert System and enhanced community features like event calendars, meal schedule and digital signage. GrandCare founder and CEO Charlie Hillman commented, “GrandCare is delighted to reinforce our partnership with LeadingAge of MN and be on display at this innovative event. Together we are reinventing the care delivery model to be more proactive, predictive and cost-effective.”

To find out more about what GrandCare is up to, visit us on the web at grandcare.com. Ask us about our discounted pricing for senior care providers at sales@grandcare.com today!

GrandCare Targeted as Must Have Comprehensive Tool According to Writer, Christine Halaba

Through the years, different generations found ways to help their elders cope with aging and its effects. The efforts of recent generations led to fruitful solutions such as the birth of home health care in Chicago and other parts of America. This allowed seniors to receive the health care services that they need in the comfort of their own homes. Aside from this, today’s generation has another weapon in its arsenal – technology.

We are living in a digital world, so it’s no surprise that several outstanding individuals found ways to create devices that are meant to aid the older portion of the population with their needs. These genius innovations are meant to assist aging adults – with the help of their caregivers – as they face the challenges of aging. If you are looking to equip your loved ones with necessary items to help ease the obstacles of growing old, check the gadgets below:

Medical Alert System

Several difficulties arise as people grow older and one of these is problems with mobility or balance. Older people are likely to fall down and injure themselves. In case this happens to your loved one, how will she be able to ask for help? Medical alert system, or Personal Emergency Response System (PERS), allows your loved one to contact you or her caregiver in case of an emergency.

Thanks to constant innovations, the PERS gadgets available in the market today are wireless and more mobile. You won’t have to worry anymore whenever your aging parents are out of your sight because they now have a means to contact you. At the same time, your parents will be at ease about moving around freely because they know that you are only a click away.

Automatic Pill Dispensers

Sometimes, people decide to hire home care because their loved one is becoming forgetful. This is especially problematic when your loved one has to take different medications for their ailments every day. With all those medicines, it might be difficult for her to remember which one to take at what time.

Good thing electronic pill dispensers are now available in the market. Electronic pill dispensers doesn’t only dispense pills, you can also set them to remind your loved one what medicine to take at what time. Not only that – this gadget can also alert you when your stock is running low! An automatic pill dispenser will allow your loved one to easily get her medicine and reduce the risk of forgetting when to drink them.

Pre-Programmed Phones

Most people rely on smartphones to stay connected with their friends and families anywhere. Despite this, older adults tend to shy away from phones. It can be difficult to convince your elders to use mobile phones because they sometimes find it too complex. That’s why the arrival of senior-friendly phones in the market is such good news.

Mobile phones are a good way to be in contact with your loved one especially if they are out visiting their friends or just strolling around the mall. Plus, it has other applications that can entertain your loved one like music and games. Just make sure that before you give the phone, your number, any of your immediate family member, and your caregiver’s are already pre-programmed in the phone directory.

GrandCare Systems

The three devices stated above are just some of the gadgets that your loved ones should possess at all to help them cope with the effects of aging. Although if you want, there is one tool that can deliver all the benefits of the said three gadgets and more! The GrandCare Systems is an advantageous device that allows your parents to contact their family and friends, view medication reminders, and access information. Basically, it combines the advantages of many separate devices into one tool!

Despite its many uses, your parents don’t have to be tech savvy in order to use GrandCare. In addition, you can access the care portal using any device and leave notes and reminders or just check on your parents. GrandCare is your parents’ all in one tool for communication and information.

Today’s generation is using technology wisely to create devices that will aid the older population as they deal with the effects of aging. Just remember that these tools are not meant to fully replace caregivers, rather, to help them assist an aging person. Before you buy any of the gadgets listed above, remember to discuss it with your loved ones first. Including them in the decision-making process – especially one that involves them – is a must.

Author Bio

Christine Halaba is a Communications degree holder and a freelance writer from the Philippines. Her contributions as a writer can be seen in different blogs for home care, advertising, and health and wellness. Her hobbies include leisure and traveling.  

Preventing Senior Isolation

Green Bank, West Virginia, is arguably the most isolated place in the nation. A large telescope designed to monitor for signals from the universe requires a 13,000 square mile “quiet zone”, encompassing much of West Virginia and even stretching as far north as the Maryland border. In this “quiet zone”, residents live with no cellular telephone service, no Internet, no radio, and until recently, no microwaves. For the most part, the residents of this community are completely isolated. They have very limited means of communicating with the outside world. Today, seniors living outside of Green Bank, West Virginia are also feeling cut off and lonely. But why?

One could argue that our current population is the most connected it has ever been. People walking around with cell phones, tablets, connected wearables, bluetooth head pieces, and smartwatches are more connected than ever.  The difficulty is that technologies that support better communication are often complicated, daunting and rarely designed for the 65+ population in mind.

It could be a difficult leap for someone who has witnessed the rise and fall of the typewriter, for example, to be expected to set up and operate a laptop computer or figure out how to place a video call. “Technophobia” may be running rampant in senior housing, leaving loved ones with limited means for contact. It does not seem right that in this “connected world” we live in that one whole gaping generation is left in the cold, alone and lonely.  

Enter GrandCare Systems, a company created in 2005 to combat senior isolation and help keep families connected and provide “peace of mind”.  The GrandCare System was designed to be self maintaining and require ZERO technical know-how from the loved one. It simply works and seamlessly connects them to one touch video chat with family, friends and even healthcare providers. Pictures automatically populate the large GrandCare touchscreen from various family facebook photo albums. Family can login to the care portal from any mobile device or computer and send messages, reminders, schedule appointments, add to dos and check in to see if mom needs anything.  

Is your loved one lonely or isolated?  That’s not right. Let GrandCare help. Contact us.

mHealth v. Face-to-Face Care

You’ve been sick for days. Your head hurts, your throat hurts–everything hurts. You’ve already tried cold meds, herbal tea, and home remedies. You’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, so now you have to make a choice: do you see a doctor or not?  Used to be, those were the two options people had. However, as technology has improved, so have our options for seeking medical treatment. Would you trust a smartphone app, video call, or texting service to give you a proper diagnosis and provide you the relief you need?

More and more people are saying yes to mHealth or mobile health.  

Whether you’re using a grandCARE system to monitor your vitals, remind you to take your medications, or video chat with a doctor halfway around the world, technology is undoubtedly changing the the way we take care of ourselves.

In-home health care systems like grandCARE are a great way to introduce technology into the lives of elders. And for the technophobes, grandCARE is a self-maintaining “supersystem.” Everything from Skype and HIPAA compliant video calls to facebook photo integration and daily reminders can be handled without grandma ever having to even touch the grandCARE touchscreen.

So, can a computer monitor really enhance and empower an in-home caregiver? Can a video chat session save windshield time and empower a caregiver to check in on several clients at once?  Why is every house not equipped with grandCARE and making life simply better for seniors?  Call us today and order a system for your loved one at an all time low price. 262-338-6147 sales@grandcare.com

Developing a New Model of Care

 

By: Laura Mitchell

The digital health technology industry is ramping up quickly, and everyone understands the critical and immediate need for enabling technologies to turn our man-on-man caregivers into zone caregivers. The technology works. Study after study proves that telemedicine does benefit patients, medication adherence technologies do help mitigate hospital readmissions, and that loneliness and isolation do decrease. The implementation difficulties lie not in the technologies themselves, but instead in the delivery of the model of care, utilizing these new omniscient technologies. So, how do we do it? That’s a whole different question.

The most difficult thing in this “new” aging in place technology industry is determining who uses the technology, who pays for it, and how to encourage resident and caregiver compliance with technology.

At GrandCare, we utilize digital health, activity remote monitoring, touchscreen-based socialization, media sharing, and video chat as a platform to connect caregivers to aging loved ones or clients, while providing the caregivers with proactive, preventative information to enable the safety and independence of the care recipient.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

We thought so…in 2005. That’s when we started this amazing and fantastically frightening journey of trying to convince the industry that there actually was a need. The trick at the time was to persuade the world that technology could actually play a role in helping to care for a loved one. The technology would NOT be a cyborg that dismissed the need for a personal caregiver, but instead could enhance hands-on caregiving. The notion would be that the centerpiece socialization piece would engage the care recipient by providing games, entertainment and information (weather, news, etc.), while connecting them to family through picture/video sharing, letter exchanges, scheduling, and one-touch video chatting.

Meanwhile, a series of optional wireless devices (bluetooth blood pressure devices, glucometers, motion detectors, indoor temperature readers, etc.) would sit passively around the home and report on potential red flags. For example, if a person did not get out of bed in the morning, didn’t access a fridge at mealtime or if the indoor temperature was out of range, someone could be notified.

To those nay-sayers of technologies to promote independence at home, I honestly don’t get it. Perhaps these are the same folks that were completely appalled at the idea of telephones. Would anyone personally visit anyone anymore? Or remember when answering machines came out and it was appalling to think about talking to a machine? I was involved in the very early days of an Internet Service Provider (the first in our county in Wisconsin) and I recall teaching classes called Internet fundamentals where I explained the “Internet” using library analogies, taught the finer arts of how to install Netscape Navigator on a CD. I taught HTML fundamental classes and advised a number of local businesses on how the Internet was going to better their businesses and why they needed websites. I recall many saying the idea was interesting, but their customers would NEVER be directed to a computer and instead would always demand to talk to a live person. Some of these same companies provide today the finest web experience, online stores and help centers with live chat features (yes, this does go to a real person).

The amount of horrified comments about how folks would rather die than have any piece of assistive technology was, well, insane. Forget about the irony in which people posted how much they hate technology on an Internet chat forum, but why the fear? Why the anger?

#grandCAREworks #ItActuallyWorks

Laura is a founding member of GrandCare Systems and remains a strategic growth advisor for the pioneer digital health organization.