About the SeniorAdvisor.com 2014 In-Home Innovation Scholarship: We started the scholarship program to bring awareness of the unique benefits and challenges of in-home caregiving for seniors to younger generations. The questions posed by the scholarship encouraged our nation’s future caregivers to present solutions for improving home care in the United States. College-aged students were required to answer one of the three essay topics below and provide a short bio as part of their scholarship application. Read the winning essays here.

How can the healthcare industry use technology to improve in-home care for American seniors?

Essay response by Alyssa Kruger, University of Central Florida

There is something inevitable in reaching the age where we become a senior citizen. Within time brings health issues, which need some form of care. My grandparents are a prime example of this and as a family we chose in-home care to aid in my grandfather’s diagnosis of melanoma. This was an extremely rough time for us just seeing how this disease was changing the man I considered a second father. Being over my grandparent’s house while all this was going on, I was exposed to some areas that could use improvement by the help of technology.

My grandparents had an aid twelve hours a day, seven days a week, but clearly this wasn’t enough. The cancer was deteriorating my grandpa’s leg muscles. He was constantly falling, sometimes when the aid was there and other times when he was home alone. The aids would return and he was be stuck on the floor and sometimes needing stitches. If a video monitoring system were put in place in the house that allowed the aid’s to check on them while not at the house, this would reduce a major safety issue. In the last weeks before cancer took his life, he fell over twelve times with two trips to the emergency room. The video monitoring system would have given my family the peace of mind that someone was always watching.

With all the problems of old age, hearing loss seems to be unavoidable. When we first started using an aid for my grandparents, no matter what doorbell system we used they would never hear them at the door. After a few months of service we eventually did give them a key to the house but my mother did not feel comfortable with the idea in the beginning. Technology would be a  great help if a bracelet that vibrates when the doorbell rings was put in place. No matter if they were napping or had the TV extremely loud they would know that in-home care aid was at the door. This bracelet could also help with reminding patients to take medications, if help is needed to get off a toilet, and many other day-to-day activities.

For my last idea of how technology can improve in home care for seniors, is something I found to be a bit of an annoyance for our aids that helped my grandparents. We went through multiple aids who always needed to know what medications to give them and how may. We did have it written out but some would take it home by accident then forget it. If there was a devices that could load all of their medications then separates it into days. The aid could simply just press the day of the machine and know they were getting the right dose. It could even call in refills when one medication was getting low. This could really ease a lot of family’s minds because taking a wrong dose would be impossible. My grandmother for example would go into the cabinets after the aid had left, and take medication that was already given to her. Thankfully this only resulted in a severe headache.

Overall, my family and I owe our in-home care aids for treating my grandparents as if they were their own. American seniors are blessed to have such programs set in place for them. I can only see technology making it even better and providing elders with more safety. I can only imagine how amazing the health care industry will be when I am an senior.

About Alyssa

Alyssa is currently a student at the University of Central Florida.