Top Digital Tools For At Home Caregivers
At Visiting Angels in Newington, CT, we highly recommend these innovative digital tools for at home caregivers
Family care providers have many daily responsibilities, from home maintenance and meal preparation to meaningful conversation and transportation around town. To make some tasks less time-consuming and relieve stress, as a caregiver for your loved one, you should start using one or more digital tools and apps designed with at home caregivers in mind.
Communication
Communicating with your loved one's medical team, various service providers, family members, and friends is much easier with the existence of emails, text messages, phone calls, and video calls through platforms such as Skype, FaceTime, and Zoom. However, even with these tools, communicating with everyone involved in your loved one's care can be demanding. That's why you should consider CaringBridge, a platform for creating a private website about your parent. You can post daily updates on the site and significantly reduce the time needed to keep everyone up to date with your loved one's condition.
Medication Reminders & Management
At home caregivers without formal medical training may find it difficult to manage their loved ones' daily medications. Luckily, there are many tools and resources that can help you ensure your parent is taking their meds as prescribed by their doctors. For instance, you can opt for Reminder Rosie ($119.95), a personalized reminder system, or MedCoach ($4 per month), a service that sends medication reminders to your phone and also connects you to the local pharmacy for refills. PillPack is another useful service for medication management that sorts and packs medications by the dose and sends it to your address. You can also choose a pill organizer such as The Sagely SMART Weekly Pill Organizer that can be used together with the free Sagely Pill Reminder App, available for iOS and Android.
Delegating Care
As a family caregiver, you simply cannot do it all alone. However, even when family and friends are involved, it can be hard to keep up with who's doing what and when. The Care Calendar by Lotsa Helping Hands can help you with managing all your responsibilities and delegating care. The tool comes free of charge.
Support Groups
At home caregivers are often under a lot of stress and may need to speak to someone who understands what they are going through. If you want to share your experience, read other people's stories, ask for advice, and more, you should think about joining online support groups, such as:
- Caregivers Connect or Caregivers and the Eldercare Community, both useful private Facebook groups where you can connect with other at home caregivers.
- #ElderCareChat or #CareChat, Twitter groups where you can talk to other people caring for seniors.
- Caregiving.com, a website with many support groups where caregivers from all walks of life gather to share their stories.
Fall Monitoring
Falls are a major health concern for seniors, as they may result in fractured bones, hip injuries or head trauma. To ensure fast response times in case of an emergency, your loved one should opt for a personal emergency response system such as Medical Guardian or Great Call's Lively.
Visiting Angels of Newington, CT, is a leading provider of non-medical in-home care services for seniors. Our office serves Hartford County, Waterbury, and Springfield, MA. To learn more about the in-home living assistance services provided by our staff of compassionate caregivers, please call our Newington office at (860) 215-2391 or contact us for more information.
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