Canary & HomeTouch: caring together

HomeTouch adds data monitoring technology to suite of home care services

Partnering with Canary Care, The UK’s leading online home care service offers door monitoring alert services to provide data and security to elderly

HomeTouch, the UK market leader in online home care, today announces the availability of advanced home monitoring services for elderly clients across the UK.

Canary Care is the category leader in advanced home monitoring technology for elderly residents. Its easy to install system monitors movement, door activity and temperature levels through a series of sensors within the home – rather than cameras or microphones – to ensure both the safety and privacy of elderly residents. This partnership will enable HomeTouch to provide a new level of security for elderly people who are living at home.

Canary will also support HomeTouch carers with data from the sensors that can be used to identify potential hazards and changes to health conditions. For example, an elderly person with dementia leaving their house in the middle of the night will signal an alert on their mobile phone , so that family or carers can react in a timely manner.

Dr Jamie Wilson, CEO and Founder of HomeTouch said: “Our client services team have a duty of care to our clients whose families increasingly rely on us to advise on the appropriate levels of care to preserve their loved one’s dignity, comfort and safety at home. Canary’s product is easy to use, affordable and unintrusive, providing critical information about the physical and emotional state of an elderly person. As the ageing population increasingly prefers to remain in their own homes, our goal is to bring the care sector up to date, using technology to positively impact the lives of the elderly and their carers.”

The home monitoring data is transmitted to a granular dashboard available to HomeTouch’s care advisers who are now trained to interpret early warning signals and behavioural patterns that may indicate an elderly client requires a change in care intensity or frequency.

Stuart Sheehy, CEO Canary Care, said: “We are thrilled to work with HomeTouch as we are aligned in a shared mission to apply technology to facilitate keeping elderly and vulnerable people safely in their homes. This partnership will provide the perfect combination of  human support with technology reinforcement to truly support the growing ageing population to remain independent at home.”

The Canary Care monitoring system is available to purchase from http://www.myhometouch.com/canarycare.

About HomeTouch

HomeTouch is the most advanced online service to quickly and easily find in-home carers for elderly people across the UK. It uses technology to match customers with local and live-in carers who have the experience, skills and qualifications to suit specific needs to offer quality assurance and peace of mind for customers. HomeTouch carers have detailed profiles with reviews and video testimonials that highlight specialised skills and characteristics. Bypassing the agency model, carers using HomeTouch are paid 75% above average wages.

About Canary Care

Canary Care aims to support families and carers with real time information about how their loved one is doing, so benefiting carers, not reducing human contact. The critical difference with Canary’s technology is that the information and alerts enable preventative care to be provided, so preventing a minor health issue becoming a major crisis. Canary is an award winning home monitoring technology provider. It recently won an award from Global Insurer Swiss Re and has a distribution partnership with BT. Canary is also part of the NHS Test Bed programme where the technology is being used to support carers in North East London.

Avoiding the crisis

A short video to show how technology can help us gain greater insights into how someone is coping at home. If we can identify specific issues, like not eating at mealtimes, they can be dealt with before it reaches crisis point.

Information helps everyone feel more in control of the situation and able to make better, more informed decisions. That has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?

Unblocking hospital beds

Lord Carter’s report today suggests that bed blocking costs the NHS £900m a year “Vulnerable and frail patients cannot be released if there is not the support in the community from home care workers or district nursing staff or a place in a care home”.

Whilst, undoubtedly, social care is a key element to allow older and vulnerable people to be released from hospital and go home, there are other things that can be done to help support people and carers in the community.

The case study above from Coventry City Council shows how technology can play an enormous part in getting people home and keeping them at home. We know that independence is so important to older people and, if they are well enough, being at home, feeling safe and confident, has a positive impact on their health and wellbeing.

Information can play a vital role in helping us care better and more effectively – not just to provide the much needed cost savings but to ensure people get the right care, at the right time. Technology can provide this information – the insight, for example, that someone isn’t going into the kitchen at mealtimes, or that they are not putting themselves to bed or getting up several times in the night.

By gathering this information, we can understand a person’s individual needs better – and look after them, better. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Canary talks about how technology helps provide better care on 5 Live

Live interview on Radio 5 Live on 22nd January 2016

Peter Allen (presenter):

Melanie Newdick, you use technology to help you care for your Mum

Melanie Newdick (who cares for her Mum who has dementia):

We do indeed, yes

We use a monitoring system called Canarycare, which we found on the internet. We’ve been using it for about 2 years and it means that we can dial in any time and see. It has monitors on the wall that show us where Mum is and where she has been moving around in the house

Peter:

Like CCTV effectively is it?

Melanie:

Well it isn’t funnily enough which is one of the things we liked about it because homecare is done apparently where there is CCTV so this is just an infra red detector not a camera

 

You just pick up the fact that there has been movement detected in the room. We felt like CCTV was a bit of an invasion of Mum’s privacy to be honest so this was a really great system that gave us all the information

We get lots of information. We get movement which tells us things like whether she has been eating because we can see has she been long enough in the kitchen. It’s helped us understand her sleeping patterns. It also monitors temperature in the house so we know if the heating is working. It also monitors light and we have the door monitors fitted too so we can see who is coming in or out and whether Mum has gone out when perhaps she shouldn’t.

We can set up an alert so that if the door has opened and you chose how you receive the alert

Peter:

So you could get a bleep on your phone saying have a look at this

Melanie:

Yes

Peter:

Right, is it expensive, Melanie?

Melanie:

We bought our system and I think it was about £270 to buy and we pay about £15 a month for monitoring

Peter:

So it’s not a fortune and presumably in terms of if you want to look at it in terms of a health spending perspective, you probably save someone a lot of money by doing it this way

Melanie:

I think we have and I think if we had looked at Mum’s dementia symptoms alone, we would have thought that she was deteriorating and she would have been heading for a home much earlier on but actually we know a lot of the problems are problems with sleep so yes I definitely think there are huge savings and also great peace of mind for us too.

Peter:

Well that’s very interesting, thank you, Melanie. That’s a very positive story. Best of luck to you in the future. Stuart Sheehy, is Managing Director of Canary Care who supplied this technology to Melanie. Sounds like she has done the job for you really because she loves the system.

Stuart (Managing Director of Canary Care):

Yes it’s great for us to be able to help people like Melanie and her Mum using this technology and, you’re right, she has summed it up extremely well as to what we are trying to achieve with the technology and what the technology can do. It’s really about keeping people independent at home for longer, it’s about supporting carers and their families, giving them reassurance that their loved one is safe and well or giving them a message if there is something untoward…   if someone doesn’t go into the kitchen in the morning and they are still in bed then it allows you to intervene that little bit earlier, you can make a phone call, if a care visit needs to be changed and someone needs to pop in earlier then we can achieve that so it’s allowing the care system to adapt to the person that should be at the centre of the care package that is being delivered.

Peter:

Yes and it gives you that monitoring ability……it doesn’t replace care does it but it means you can be a bit more specific about when and how you apply care

Stuart:

Absolutely, it’s about providing better, more timely care and yes this is absolutely not about minimising care, it’s about making the care as effective as possible and providing that care at the right time to the person when they need it

Peter:

You may have heard the Government Minister saying we’re going to get involved in this sort of thing which sounds good, doesn’t it?

Stuart:

Yes, we’ve been partnering with Care City which is part of North East London Foundation Trust and Barking and Dagenham so this is actually bringing together the NHS and Social Services so that you can provide the appropriate care to individuals at home using both carers and health professionals as well.

Care & Technology – what are we scared of?

 

In most aspects of our lives, we value information. We seek out independent reviews before buying a new fridge, we check the weather forecast, we look at reports before choosing a school or university – we use technology to gather information to help us to make a more informed choice – to choose the fridge that’s right for us, to know when to go for a walk, to identify our preferred education option.

But when it comes to care, the shutters come down when we mention technology

“Yes but technology doesn’t replace human contact”

“Not sure Mum would like that”

“I don’t think we need it yet”

Let’s get one thing straight, TECHNOLOGY DOES NOT REPLACE HUMAN CARE. Of course, it doesn’t – and it’s not designed to. But what technology, like telecare, can do is help us make better, more informed choices about the care needed.

As Melanie Newdick, a carer and Non-Executive Director to NHS Highland said

Having information has totally transformed our understanding of my Mum’s dementia.

We can see that she wasn’t eating properly because we could see that she wasn’t in the kitchen long enough to prepare a meal; when the heating packed up we knew almost straight away because the temperature had dropped by one degree. More recently we’ve seen that her sleeping has become really erratic and we’ve been able to help with that.

By having information, we can identify changes in behaviour, we can see any areas where a little more support is needed, such as mealtimes or bedtimes, and we can make decisions based on fact.

Armed with information, we can make better decisions sooner – solving the issue and avoiding the crisis….therefore keeping people in their own homes and out of hospital for longer.

And those being cared for have said, according to Melanie Newdick:

…that having information has made them feel more in control. It’s given them the confidence to do things they haven’t done. It’s reduced their anxiety and worry because they can see how they are doing and they’ve made better choices because they can understand the impact of things upon their health. Just by having information they’ve made better choices. I think that’s pretty amazing.

Surely this is a better way to care – what are we scared of?

http://www.canarycare.co.uk

Using technology to make better choices

“My Mum has vascular dementia so we tried the telecare system – I’m sure you’ve heard of – it’s the button that you press if you have an emergency. She left the pendant on a hook beside her bed, she left it in the kitchen, she left it in the lounge, she left it everywhere apart from where it should have been (around her neck) so it wasn’t effective.

Then we tried a system called Canary Care. It’s a series of transmitters that pick up movement in every room in my Mum’s house. We can see that she wasn’t eating properly because we could see that she wasn’t in the kitchen long enough to prepare a meal; when the heating packed up we knew almost straight away because the temperature had dropped by one degree. More recently we’ve seen that her sleeping has become really erratic and we’ve been able to help with that.

Having information has totally transformed our understanding of my Mum’s dementia.

But it’s just not us, users of systems….have reported that having information has made them feel more in control. It’s given them the confidence to do things they haven’t done. It’s reduced their anxiety and worry because they can see how they are doing and they’ve made better choices because they can understand the impact of things upon their health. Just by having information they’ve made better choices. I think that’s pretty amazing.

There’s much discussion about what the future of healthcare is going to be. The only certain thing is it’s going to be very different from how it is now – it just has to be. My vision is that we move from being a breakdown service to a wellbeing service.

Let’s use technology to make better choices and to stay healthy and in the words of Albert Einstein, a clever person solves a problem but a wise person avoids a problem.”

Melanie Newdick, who cares for her Mum

Cold can kill

We don’t want to be scaremongering we just want people to take simple steps to stay well this winter.

This is a useful little video that show the affect that the cold can have on older and vulnerable people.

Make sure you know when your relative’s home drops below 18 degrees – Canary can send you a text. It could make all the difference.

Canary saved my 82 year old Father’s life

The following words are from a Canary customer:

 

A few weeks ago Canary saved my 82 year old father’s life. How?

I live 150 miles from my father and am his only relative in the UK.

Each morning when I wake up and turn on my iPhone I get 3 Canary emails. One tells me that my father has got up once in the night (movement detected in bedroom at xxam), one tells me that he has got up next morning (movement detected in bedroom at xxam) and one telling me that the temperature has risen above 25 degrees (this is my father cooking his breakfast in the kitchen). These emails provide remote reassurance that my father is sticking to his normal routine.

One morning a few weeks ago I woke up as normal and turned on my iPhone – no Canary emails. I immediately logged into Canary and from the activity charts could see that the reason there had been no emails that morning was that my father had never left the lounge from the night before.

I immediately called a neighbour who was able to get into the house and found my father unconscious in the lounge. Paramedics were called and he was admitted to hospital with an infection. He came out several days later and has recovered.

Without Canary I would never have known so quickly that my father had a serious problem which had prevented him from going to bed.

Keep developing Canary – it truly is a life saver.

Martin

Our top three ways to help prevent falls

The prevalence and risk of falls in older people has been highlighted in the news lately, with the costs resulting from these falls making the headlines. There are some simple ways to reduce the likelihood of falls and to prevent further falls taking place.

When someone has a fall, they are usually asked a set of specific questions to identify the possible causes of that fall and markers to indicate the risk of future falls. They will also be observed walking, or standing up from a chair to assess their strength, balance, coordination and control. Following one or more falls, some patients can be referred to a Falls Clinic where they will receive a comprehensive set of tests and be seen by a range of health professionals including a doctor, nurse, occupational therapist and physiotherapist. General health checks will be carried out and follow up appointments arranged to monitor the patient’s progress.

As a general guide, there are certain common causes which could increase the risk of falls and preventative action can be taken to avoid possible premature incidents of falling.

Our top three simple ways to reduce the chance of falls

1. Nutrition, hydration and staying active – Diet plays a big part in our overall health and it is important that older people are eating and drinking enough of the right kinds of food throughout the day. Poor diet can lead to lower energy levels and poorer condition of bones. Ask your GP surgery for help with balancing your diet and making sure you get enough important nutrients to support and strengthen your body. Increasing your intake of Calcium – tinned fish (with bones), nuts and broccoli; Vitamin D – oily fish, egg yolk, liver & sunlight; and Iron – red meat, seafood, wholegrain cereals, green leafy vegetables, eggs, seeds & nuts – can all help in preventing fracture or breakage from falls.Dehydration can lead to loss of energy and dizziness, particularly in hot weather. Make sure you have easy access to a regular supply of fluid, preferably water. If you are unsteady on your feet, keep a jug of fresh water by your seat and drink from it regularly throughout the day. Keeping active, even in tasks around the home, can help keep our muscles and joints working and strong. Inactivity can lead to a decrease in muscle tone and an increase in stiffness of joints, leading to reduced flexibility and mobility.

2. Environmental – Slippery floors and unsuitable footwear are some of the major factors contributing to over a third of all falls annually (RoSPA, 2014). Loose wires, worn rugs, uneven flooring and items left lying around can all pose risks for possible falls. It’s important to eliminate as much clutter as possible from your home and to reduce hazards which could cause you to trip. We’ve found this website which can help identify and reduce hazards in your home which could cause you to fall: http://www.health.wa.gov.au/stayonyourfeet/steps/hazards.cfm

3. Visit your GP – to review your medication and ask about being referred to a local exercise scheme to improve coordination, balance and flexibility     

The cause of a fall is often multifactorial, so you might want to consider these other factors;

• Fall history – Those who have already fallen are up to three times more likely to fall again within a year (Kapas, 2014). Make sure you visit your GP surgery to alert them about your fall and ask them for further advice on reducing the risks of future falls.  

• Gait – How we walk and control our walk and our posture/transfers can play a big part in the likelihood of increased falls. Our reflexes, muscle strength, coordination and flexibility usually decline with age. These can further be affected by a specific illness or disease affecting our skeletal system for example, or as a result of prolonged inactivity (Kapas, 2014). If you notice a change or decline in your walk it would be advisable to visit your GP following which the adoption of a new exercise regime designed to strengthen muscles and increase flexibility may be recommended. Contact Age UK to get a list of the nearest centres to you which provide these exercise classes. They have a lot of information on their website about falls prevention and exercises to help reduce the risks of falling.

• Sensory – Sight, hearing and touch can all impact on how well we mobilise. Conditions such as glaucoma, cataract and macular degeneration can cause problems with the quality of our sight and therefore contribute to risks associated with falls. Conditions affecting our ears or balance and conditions such as diabetes which may reduce our sensory receptors, can all increase these risks. Make a note of anything you note which is affecting your mobility or coordination. Mention this to your GP or other health professional that you see.

• Medication and medical history – Older people will often have a range of different medication treating different conditions which can often increase the risk of falls, which is why it is so important to visit GPs in order to review the risk factors associated with this. The medications most commonly associated with falls in older people come under the following categories;
• Antihypertensives – ACE inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers, calcium channel blockers, hydralazine, methyldopa
• Beta-blockers – propranolol, timolol
• Antidepressants – sertraline, trazodone, dosulepin, amitriptyline
• Diuretics – such as bendroflumethiazide, furosemide, co-amilofruse 
• Benzodiazepines – (treating anxiety) diazepam, temazepam, chlordiazepoxide
• Antipsychotics – chlorpromazine, flupentixol, haloperidol, olanzapine, quetiapine, risperidone
• Other sedatives/hypnotics – sleeping aids such as zopiclone, nitrazepam, sedating antihistamines (e.g. diphenhydramine, promethazine)
• Opioids – (pain relief) morphine, buprenorphine, diamorphone, fentanyl, methadone, oxycodone, tramadol, codeine
• NSAIDs – anti inflammatory – diclofenac, ibruprofen 
• There are also higher risks of falls associated with some medication treating cardiovascular conditions and those taking antiepileptic medications (Kalpas, 2014) and those experiencing urinary incontinence and urgency (FRAZE, 2011).                                                                                                                                                        Again, make a note of any unusual symptoms that you notice and mention this to your GP so that she can make suitable changes to your prescription or complete further tests. Always check the side effects of the medication that you’re taking and don’t be afraid to ask your GP questions about medications that are prescribed. If it’s difficult to get to see your GP, you can pop into a local pharmacy and ask the pharmacist there as they can give you a lot of helpful information about different medications.

• Mobility – Is a walking aid being used and is it being used appropriately i.e. at all times when required? Is it the suitable type, size and condition for the person using it? Is a walking aid required? If you feel you may benefit from a walking aid or a new walking aid, you can visit your nearest independent living shop to receive advice on what would be most appropriate for you. 

• Condition of feet – As well as being aware of the condition of the footwear being worn, close attention should be paid to the condition of the actual feet and regular chiropody appointments should be arranged to maintain foot health. Free foot health is offered on the NHS, so ask your GP about a referral. Also, it is really important to take care of your feet so check out this website for tips on how to do so: http://www.nobilis.co.uk/general-health/71-happy-feet-the-importance-of-foot-care-in-the-elderly 

• Cognitive and mental health – Delirium, acute confusional state or paranoia can all contribute to an increased risk of falls but can be monitored through GPs. Conditions which can confuse the way we think or view things can also increase our risk of falling, as they cloud judgement and can muddle our minds.  

• Alcohol/drug usage – As with all drugs entering the body, their impact can affect the whole body, leading to side effects which will increase the risk of falls.  

• Any mind altering substance has the potential to affect our bodily functions and perceptions, so increased use of recreational drugs and alcohol can increase our risk of falls.

http://www.ageuk.org.uk/professional-resources-home/services-and-practice/health-and-wellbeing/falls-prevention-resources/

http://www.rospa.com/homesafety/adviceandinformation/olderpeople/accidents.aspx#where

Making older people feel useless

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Soren Kierkegaard

“There’s not much more I can contribute to life” she said, stooping over her walking stick, looking at the ground. “I can’t see, I can’t hear and I can’t even walk properly. What use am I now?” She spoke in a clear, steady voice to her carer, looking to him for some kind of response. “You can teach us what it is to age” he replied “because we all will do. You can teach us the importance of patience because we’re all less so these days. You can teach us what it is to have faith in people; tell us what it felt like to trust people coming to your front door, not feeling the need to lock it behind you. You can teach us what it means to respect, because there’s not much of it around at the moment. You can tell us your stories, share with us your wisdom and teach us to live. Tell us all the things that your eyes have seen. If people can’t see your use, then they’re not looking hard enough.”

How sad that we can let our older population believe that they are useless. How sad that we allow them to be excluded from our society. How strange that we ask for a long and healthy life and then fear old age. Their lives, their stories, their experiences can only enrich our own. Maybe if we viewed getting older in a different way, with help from the media and advertising, older people wouldn’t feel as old, wouldn’t feel as useless.