Can a piece of software look after your elderly parent?
Kellye Franklin recalls the devastation when her now 81-year-old father, a loyal air force veteran, tried to make his own breakfast one morning. Seven boxes of open cereal on the living room floor with milk poured directly into every one of them. He would later be diagnosed with moderate to severe dementia.
Yet Franklin, 39, who is her dad’s only child and his primary caregiver, does not worry about that repeating now.
In late 2019, she had motion sensors that are connected to an artificial intelligence (AI) system installed in the two-floor townhome she and her dad share in Inglewood, in Los Angeles county. Sensors at the top of doors and in some rooms monitor movements and learn the pair’s daily activity patterns, sending warning alerts to Franklin’s phone if her dad’s normal behavior deviates – for instance if he goes outside and doesn’t return quickly.
“I would have gotten an alert as soon as he went to the kitchen that morning,” she says, because it would have been out of the ordinary for her dad to be in the kitchen at all, especially that early. Franklin says the system helps her “sanity”, taking a little weight off an around-the-clock job.
Welcome to caregiving in the 2020s: in rich societies, computers are guiding decisions about elder care, driven
