Ask Slashdot: Bulletproof Video Conferencing For Alzheimers Home? 194
Milo_Mindbender writes I'm trying to find a bulletproof near zero maintenance video conferencing client for shared use in an Alzheimers living facility. It's used so the patients can regularly see their relatives who are often out of town. Most everything I've tried on PC or Mac requires tweeks/updates from time to time to keep it working, not good in a place where there are no computer savvy people. It looks like most of the low cost dedicated boxes have died out too. The ideal setup will be turnkey with little-to-no maintenance and if possible support auto-answering calls from approved users. It needs to be compatible with video conferencing apps the relatives can easily get on phone/tablet/pc such as Skype, Facetime, Hangouts...etc. Any suggestions?
Bill $10K up front and 50K a year (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a full time tech on site with that and bill each patient health insurance a monthly or daily or per use fee.
That is how most things healthcare marketplace work.
Video phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or how about you just buy the video phones like
http://www.sophiesystems.com/g... [sophiesystems.com]
There are some that are skype compatible. You can then encourage the families to buy a video phone or if they are tech savy they could skype as well.
Re:FaceTime (Score:5, Insightful)
For distant relatives that were not tech savvy, I did this. Worked very well over the years with several times a week usage. The iPad 2 that was left there was loaded with iOS 5 and was not able to do the on-air updates Apple pushes out now.
It worked fine until I had a chance to visit at the end of last year where I updated it to iOS 7 and the latest everything. Still works.
This is about as bulletproof as you can get. Even the UI (once FaceTime is set up properly) is easy to manage. It chimes with the name of the caller, swipe and you are talking.
Added bonuses are:
Lots of people already own Apple devices, so they have everything they need.
You can use the lowest model offered by Apple (iPad 2, non-retina mini) to keep the costs down as much as possible.
Devices can be locked down as much as desired
Development costs are cheap, you can get a dev license for $99 and roll out your own app ad-hoc (but you will have to renew and redeploy once a year before the dev cert expires). Still, no app is really necessary.
family pictures? for alzheimers patients? (Score:3, Insightful)
Posting AC, so I don't undo the moderation I've already done.
The rest of your comment is fine, but for Alzheimers patients, this is a complete waste of time. We've had to stop bringing my grandmother to large family functions, as she gets so confused and possibly frustrated when she doesn't recognize anyone. (luckily, my cousin's daughter is good at telling when she's getting frustrated, and distracts her with hugs).
We were all together for Thanksgiving a few years ago when she asked my mom who she was, and my mom replied 'I'm your daughter' to which my grandmother replied 'You can't be my daughter, you're old'. Mind you, my mom goes up and visits her for lunch almost every week, so it's not like her grandchildren and great-grandchildren who she would've have seen for a few months. At one point that night, she said that she was going to do a cartwheel, after seeing her great-granddaughter show off that she had learned how to do one. (I managed to convince her that there wasn't enough room, as she was twice the height)
I've heard other stories from folks ... one in which his mom (might've been grandmother) was hitting on him ... which has got to be disturbing, but we're hoping it was just that he reminded her of her dead husband, and she's in a similar situation of not being aware just what age she is.
So ... this might be a great idea for a general retirement community -- but for Alzheimers patients, like my 90 year old grandmother who is now kept in a locked wing after wandering off (she was going to visit her parent ... who have been dead for 40+ years) ... you'd be better off labeling the phone numbers so the staff know who the people are. (eg. 'Mary Smith's son Joe'). ... and I'm not even sure that video conferencing is a good idea for Alzheimer patients. The only good thing is that by *not* taking her out of the nursing home, you don't have to deal with the issues of her not believe that's where she's been living for the last 8 year when you take her back.
Maintenance (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't want to maintain a system, then don't deploy it. Either pay someone to maintain it for you, or plan to maintain it yourself. You seem to want to be a hero and give unknowing non-technical users a complex system and then abandon it because it takes too much time.
example of "dork" thinking ruining tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Splab, thank you.
Thank you for giving us an a *perfect* example, in the wild, of *exactly* how techies answer questions condescendingly & with making big assumptions, but most importantly, demonstrating you have a high level of technical knowledge, but not ***ACTUALLY FIXING THE PROBLEM***
People like you have been making tech obnoxious for decades, and it needs to stop. /. bear witness:
It is perfect. All the elements are there. This kind of response typifies interactions between people with tech problems and those who claim to be able to fix them.
First, obviously OP was asking about **low maintenence for everyone** not just one subset. This is the language voodoo. Conjuring a dichotomy of meaning where there is none.
2nd, we see the dork/troll complete the circle by insinuating that OP was ("obviously!") being unreasonable thinking they could get something at required **absolutely** no maintenence...for that he's, of course, "shit out of luck"
But OP didn't as for "absolutely no maintenence"...but for the dork/troll that doesn't matter. This whole thing was a way for parent to demonstrate superiority by dropping some jargon & then making the original person out to be dumb for ever asking the question.
***WE MUST STOP DOING THIS FOREVER***
It's ruining our industry, and our work life quality. People hate a person who (having demonstrated their technical knowledge by dropping jargon) wastes their time.
When people need help, it's wrong to use that as an opportunity to make yourself look smarter. It only makes everything worse, and it causes the other person to hate you and tech in general.
Just stop. Forever. The whole routine...let's just end it...
Re: FaceTime (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: WebRTC, Asterisk/FreeSwitch and a JS SIP clie (Score:4, Insightful)
I know I'm gonna get modded down for this - so be it:
Typical /. radical evangelism for open source, at all costs (metaphorically, not $$), without regard for the whole of the circumstances.
If there was a dedicated IT team, fine. If this was just OP and his grandma only, fine. Any of several circumstances, fine. But that's NOT the case!
Here we have lot of users, you MUST have dedicated support, and OP can't (trust me, I've been in this situation) provide that 24/7 long-term. And keep that server running, but that can be outsourced very cheaply is a delusion. Who's gonna pay for the next X years?? IT Consultants aren't cheap, and any upgrades that break things will be costly to repair, while being an outage for the users.
In a situation like this, COTS, with consumer support available and used to dealing with non-technical users (you know, the helpdesk script monkeys that piss US off...), is the way to go.