Elderly Home Care: 5 Smart Home Devices That Can Help

These days it’s important to set up your home to help facilitate your growing needs as you age–or to establish a safe, healthy environment for a loved one. This new phenomenon called “aging in place” aims to tackle the struggles that you might face staying in a home long term and help you better address your needs. With this in mind, here are five tech products that could really help your daily life or the life of an elderly loved one.

1. Voice Control You’ve probably heard about products like the Amazon Echo, which takes your voice commands and transforms them into an array of commands for devices around the home to follow. The benefits of an Echo for someone living in place is clear, gone is the constant need to learn new technology instead just with your own voice you can interact with a wide variety of tasks and helpful tools.
2. Smart Thermostat The ultra-confusing interface found on traditional thermostats can stump even the sharpest of minds. Today’s smart thermostats eliminate the complexities of setting up a heating and cooling schedule by pairing the thermostat with a simple to use mobile app.
3. Smart Appliances Products like the Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator take the refrigerator to the next level. The benefits to those aging in place is that from the ease of your fridge you can create shopping lists and order groceries without leaving your home.
4. Lighting Control Constant movement gets challenging as you continue to age, so lighting control from industry leaders like Lutron and others help eliminate strenuous unneeded movement. These devices allow homeowners to turn on and off lamps and set timers for light switches straight from their phone or via a smart assistant like the Amazon Echo.
5. Smart Doorbell Safety and security is always a concern for the elderly and video doorbells from companies like Ring, August, Doorbird, Clare Controls and others are a great way to help set that piece of mind. The doorbell allows the user to see and speak to someone at the door from the safety of your smartphone.