Journey with dementia mother - using technology to assist

Mum is a devoted Buddhist all her life. She has been sincerely offering incense to the Buddha twice every day. Slowly, she lost her ability to remember if she has offered the incense. So twice a day of incense offerings became four, five times, despite being reminded. One day, dad, a traditional Teochew man, decided enough is enough. He kept all the incenses, matches and told us he has concerned if the burning of incense will cause fire. His words stuck us. With Mum’s memory deteriorating, we need to condition her off burning incense. There is certainly a risk of fire hazard. The first day was chaotic, Mum tried to find her incenses but can’t find it. Lucky, she is a gentle character woman still. We tried to be patient with her and told her there is no need to burn incense any more. It was an uphill climb to change not only her routine but also her display of devotion to her faith. Disruption of her routine made her anxious and desperately needed to purchase it herself. Thanks...

Mobile phone as a tracking device Mum has been a wanderer all the while even when we were young. One of the first unusual thing we noticed was her coming home later and later. At first we thought she is just bored and wanted to window shop around. But something tells us it is more than that, still we have doubts and perhaps in self-denial mode ourselves. Mum has her mobility and she can walk even faster than anyone in the family, and she would not let us restrict her going out. We know she needs to be tracked as she might get lost soon. The first tracking device we got for her is a mobile phone.    The phone was a 2G based bought from Taobao. It was such a basic phone which had GPS and a Chinese online portal to locate the phone. It worked for a while but it became unreliable.    Mum hated the idea of carrying a phone and many times forgot to bring out. We decided to start researching about GPS tracker.  GPS Trackers We have a few thou...