Safety

While there have been bed alarm monitors for many years that are just simple bed pad contact closures ringing a local alarm for care providers when someone gets out of bed, there hasn’t been a way for remote family caregivers to track a loved one’s out of nightly out of bed episodes.

Beautyrest Sleeptracker and Withings Sleep shown in the Products section both provide a means for remote family caregivers to receive a daily report not only of their loved one’s out of bed episodes but also comprehensive sleep behavior pattern reports. 

These devices are Internet connected pads that fit BETWEEN the mattress and box spring and are unnoticeable by the loved one. The only requirement is that the loved one’s home has a Wi-Fi connection

In addition to daily reports, the Withings Sleep mat also provides real-time status of “in-bed” and “out-of-bed” events through IFTTT, an Internet connected app for remote family caregiver smartphones. This can be useful if the caregiver wants to be alerted if the loved one is out of bed for an extended period.

While IFTTT allows the collection of these events to be scheduled during bedtime hours, it does not provide a means to start a timer so that only the out of bed events exceeding a duration and are NOT reset by the loved one getting back into bed before the time expired.

This resettable timer problem can be solved by adding a free Internet app called Stringify. Both of these apps will run on the remote family caregiver’s smartphone with nothing needed to be done at the loved one’s home. This can all be set up remotely after the Withings Sleep pad has been installed

Here is an Instructable project with  step by step instructions.

While there have been wearable pendants and much more recently, watches that senior can wear to detect falls and call for help, there is a new product on the market that requires your loved one to not have to wear anything! This is especially useful in the bathroom and shower where most of the falls take place. 

Here is YouTube video with more information 

Take a look at the Walabot Home shown on the products page.