The Things I Find

I though this paragraph in a BBC article on Japan’s Aging Population was interesting:

Utako Ohoe, 82, still lives in her own flat. She says she does not want to become a burden on anyone else.

“I want to continue living here by myself,” she explained. “I don’t want to become dependent on my daughter. I want to stay independent.”

A clever device helps her let her family know she is still OK. When Mrs Ohoe uses her electronic kettle it sends a text message to her daughter’s mobile phone.

Twice a day it sends a summary of how many times it has been used. Any change to what is a pretty regular pattern would warn her that there might be a problem.

I wonder if there’s another way of doing that? I’ve been looking at LinuxMCE lately - I think it’s about time I built a media server - and looking at the ways it made aware of people’s location. Could it be set up to watch the front door via a reed switch? The bathroom door? Could it keep track of phone calls answered versus phone calls that go through to the answering machine via its built-in Asterisk PABX? Outgoing calls made? TV shows watched? Music listened to?

You wouldn’t want it to spy on the person, but maybe an hourly cron job that emails you if activity drops below expected levels over, say, the last three hours. You could argue for less-frequent monitoring, but I think if one of my parents had a fall they couldn’t get up from, I’d like to know within a couple of hours at the outside.