Using Electronics to Cope with COVID-19
Copyright Harris B. McKee 2020
COVID-19 has affected everyone. My wife, Mary, and I are fortunate to live in a CCRC, The Admiral at the Lake, where precautions taken by the staff and residents have been effective in limiting cases. These precautions have not been carried out without inconveniences.
Mary’s room is on one of the skilled-care floors in our Harbors wing and I live in the Independent Living (IL) tower. As I write this essay in November 2020, it has been eight months this week since I or our daughters have been able to go to her room. With the help of nurses, activities staff, and care-staff we have developed some ways to maintain our interactions.
Even before COVID, I had moved an Amazon Echo tower smart speaker to Mary’s room. This made it possible for her to call our daughters or me by asking Alexa to call us either by using the numbers posted on the wall or just to say “Alexa, call Laura” since Laura’s number was stored in my cell-phone directory. This speaker has proved even more valuable recently as I have learned to use it to “Drop-in”.
The Drop-in mode is used to let one communicate with other devices registered to the Alexa account. I simply go to one of the Alexa devices in my apartment that happens to wake to the call, “Computer” and ask it to Drop-in. It reminds me that I have four devices and asks which one I’d like to use. I respond, “Harris’ Alexa in the Harbors”, and a connection is initiated with my greeting. If Mary responds, the connection is completed and we can talk to each other. (If she doesn’t respond, my device will announce that no response has been received and break the connection.)
I have found that the best time to call is around 8:00 p.m. when she has been put to bed and the TV turned off. If the TV is still on, I say that I will call back later because she is unable to turn off the TV. Because she has difficulty initiating conversation or responding to questions, I have begun to read poems from a book of Mary Oliver’s poems. She enjoys the sound of my voice and responds sometimes to the last few lines in a poem, sometimes to the whole poem, and sometimes with an unrelated idea. Generally, after 15 or 20 minutes she is able to communicate much more effectively than when we began the Drop-in session. This Drop-in approach will work well for any system where all speakers are registered on the same Alexa-app. I have helped set such a system up for another Admiral Resident couple using two Amazon Dot devices.
Amazon has released within the last few days a new feature, the Alexa Care Hub, that allows a caregiver to interact not only in a similar Drop-in mode but actually provide some monitoring capabilities. This system applies when the Care-giver and Recipient have separate Alexa Apps. In this mode, the person receiving care has to initiate creating the link with the care giver. The care giver responds and completes setting up the network. I plan to set up this connection acting as the care recipient to daughter-care-giver Laura who will then be able to communicate through the smart speaker in Mary’s room.
Another aspect of our COVID communications has been the use of Zoom calls two or three times a week between Mary, our daughters, and me although all us are not available on every call. Making the Zoom calls reliable has been a learning process.
Mary’s Zoom device is an Amazon HD 8-inch tablet. We embed the Zoom link in the Gmail Calendar on the tablet. Entries are made either directly by Laura’s Zoom invitation or manually by me on my Gmail calendar. A staff person than connects to the Zoom call for Mary and leaves her with the tablet. In our early calls, she often reached out to touch the tablet, probably trying to touch one of us; unfortunately, the touch took her back to the home screen and though voice interaction continues, the visual connection was lost. Our daughter Margaret came up with a simple solution; she sent a cookbook protector that allows the tablet to be paced behind the protective shield and an errant touch no longer disrupts the call. (It is still possible to knock the system off the stand, but the tablet has survived those falls.)
In conclusion, thanks to the careful attention of the Harbors staff, we have been able to maintain connections that without the electronic innovations noted above would have been impossible.