Sensors Help Keep the Elderly Safe and at Home
by John Leland
originally appeared in the NY Times, February 13, 2009
Increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room or nursing homes.
Bertha Branch, 78, discovered the power of a system called eNeighbor when she fell to the floor of her Philadelphia apartment late one night without her emergency alert pendant and could not phone for help.
A wireless sensor under Ms. Branch’s bed detected that she had gotten up. Motion detectors in her bedroom and bathroom registered that she had not left the area in her usual pattern and relayed that information to a central monitoring system, prompting a call to her telephone to ask if she was all right. When she did not answer, that incited more calls — to a neighbor, to the building manager and finally to 911, which dispatched firefighters to break through her door. She had been on the floor less than an hour when they arrived. (more…)
I received this “touch”ing article about what massage does to help the loneliness in a seniors life and wanted to share it with all of you. An astounding 75% of all seniors who reside in assisted living or nursing homes never get visitors much less get touched. I hope this wonderfully written article will inspire someone to visit their loved ones and touch them. I know in my own life what a gentle touch does for me and although this article is wrtiten about massage easing the elderly’s loneliness, a gentle touch can also bring joy to a senior who needs to know they are still loved and cared about.
Using Massage to Ease the Elderly’s Loneliness
Lifespan: Hands to Hold
By Karrie Osborn
Originally published in Massage & Bodywork magazine, August/September 2004.
Copyright 2004. Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. All rights reserved.
Loneliness Can Find Us All
It’s not that she was neglected or abandoned by her family. She hadn’t been cheated out of a full life, and she wasn’t bitter about the cards she’d been dealt. On the contrary, she was a happy, well-loved woman who was full of faith, even after being widowed for more than 20 years. But no amount of faith could keep this elderly woman from being struck with loneliness after sitting alone, day after day, in her new home — a 12-by-12 room in a full-care nursing facility. She would rarely let on to her family that the isolation could be overwhelming, but visits started to end with extra-long, extra-tight hugs, and phone calls were a welcome lifeline to the world. (more…)
(photo courtesy of Metrogirl and Flickr)
Click Here to read a great article on what hospice is. I am sometimes still amazed at the lack of knowledge society has with regard to hospice. Most people still only think of calling hospice in the final days of the death process and also don’t know that hospice is covered as a benefit by Medicare. I have never met a person working in hospice that was anything less than gentle, compassionate and just the epitome of what giving is all about. Death and dying (more…)
How many people out there know what aphasia is? I wonder how many people who have had a stroke are misdiagnosed as having dementia or alzheimer’s when in reality they have aphasia.
Aphasia means ‘without word’. Medline Plus defines aphasia as a disorder caused by damage to the parts of the brain that control language. It can make it hard for you to read, write and say what you mean to say.
There are four main subcategories of aphasia : (more…)
Who Will Take Care of the Boomers and Their Family?
As a blogger for After55 I either write on topics on which I am knowledgeable, sometimes I find other people’s articles and write on them and then every once in a while I find something so powerful and heartfelt that I post it without comment.
Thanks to MsKYLADIE918 for posting this on YouTube. The original title is , “Re: A Nursing Home or A Family Member”.