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8 minutes
Good YouTube videos are hard to make. They should be informative, good-natured and, if not out-and-out funny, unintentionally amusing. This one, by Pittsburgh-based Secure Telehealth hits the spot.
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Editor in Chief:
Donna Cusano (See articles)
Contributing Editors:
Charles Lowe (See articles)
Chrys Meewella (See articles)
Founder: Steve Hards
Telehealth and Telecare Aware posts pointers to a broad range of news items. Authors of those items often use terms 'telecare' and telehealth' in inventive and idiosyncratic ways. Telecare Aware's editors can generally live with that variation. However, when we use these terms we usually mean:
• Telecare: from simple personal alarms (AKA pendant/panic/medical/social alarms, PERS, and so on) through to smart homes that focus on alerts for risk including, for example: falls; smoke; changes in daily activity patterns and 'wandering'. Telecare may also be used to confirm that someone is safe and to prompt them to take medication. The alert generates an appropriate response to the situation allowing someone to live more independently and confidently in their own home for longer.
• Telehealth: as in remote vital signs monitoring. Vital signs of patients with long term conditions are measured daily by devices at home and the data sent to a monitoring centre for response by a nurse or doctor if they fall outside predetermined norms. Telehealth has been shown to replace routine trips for check-ups; to speed interventions when health deteriorates, and to reduce stress by educating patients about their condition.
Telecare Aware's editors concentrate on what we perceive to be significant events and technological and other developments in telecare and telehealth. We make no apology for being independent and opinionated or for trying to be interesting rather than comprehensive.
What an unusual way to record blood pressure…
Isn’t in interesting how monitoring the video call also let’s us monitor the people doing the monitoring?
[Perhaps that’s what the site in the paranoia item meant by “we must be careful to monitor it as closely as it will be monitoring us”! Steve]
Childlike talk by caregivers
This video is funny but also rather sad–here’s an elderly woman who is afraid to leave the house and on Zoloft, which means she’s depressed. One can’t help but notice that she’s also a little childlike. Worse, the two caregivers speak to her like she’s a (naughty?) child. (What came first?) Even if the elderly woman is an actress, the staff ought to know better. She is an adult and deserves to be addressed as such and with respect.
The tendency of caregivers in general to speak to (not with) older adults who are patients or assisted living residents as if they were not-too-bright children or even babies has been much deplored, deservedly so, in various caregiving forums. (Having experienced this with my mom when she was in rehab, it also hits a nerve.) It also says something to me about Secure Telehealth that they couldn’t see this condescension reflected in the video.