Caregivers and Home Security

Hey, this is Larry the Cable Guy. You are listening to Hope for the Caregiver with Peter Rosenberg.

And if you're not listening to it, you're a communist, get it done. Welcome to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberg. This is the show for you as a family caregiver. More than 65 million Americans are currently serving as some type of caregiver. Maybe it's an aging parent. Maybe it's a special needs child. Maybe it is a loved one who has had trauma. That's in my case. Whatever the issue is, there's always a family caregiver. And what are your needs? What's going on with you?

How do you help a caregiver? And that's what this show is all about. 877-655-6755 if you want to be a part of the show. And we'd love to have you with us. Or you can go on to Hopeforthecaregiver.com. And send us comments, message, whatever's on your heart, whatever's on your mind.

And we'll be glad to get back to you as soon as we can. Joining me today is Andy Durroney. He is with ADT. You've all heard of ADT.

You've seen their signs everywhere. Did you know that home security is a big issue for family caregivers? Not necessarily in the event of invasions and break-ins and burglaries and so forth. That is critically important. But there's just more to it than that. There's health and safety as well. Your security, your loved one's security is more than just an alarm going off.

There are so many different things. And you know we love tech on this show. Anything that's innovative and for the family caregiver that helps us be a little bit more independent and be a little safer along our journey, we're there. And so Andy's joining us from Baltimore, Maryland.

And he is the Senior Director of Health and Innovation Programs. We're glad to have you with us, Andy. So thanks for joining us. Thanks, Peter.

It's great to be here. All right. What's been going on in home security, which has evolved significantly in the last 10 to 15 years?

Absolutely. Well, there's a whole lot and what you mentioned around home security being more than just intrusion detection or burglar alarm. ADT is moving into the different spaces, not just on the security side, which we're most known for. We've been in business for over 145 years on that security piece, but we're also starting to, well not starting, we've been doing it for a while.

ADT is also the largest home automation company in the country. And one of the things that I'm excited to be a part of is how do we take security systems and the devices and technology that are deployed in a house or maybe deployed in the house and repurpose those into useful tools that go beyond simply intrusion detection, which is very important, or life safety devices like smoke alarms and fire alarms and CO2 monitors, flood detection, etc. All those things we've been doing for a long, long time. And just kind of reimagine what can I do with these devices that are possibly already in a home or maybe installed in a home to provide you know for the listeners here, you know, a caregiver with a better way to to care for the person that they love to provide a way for say seniors or others to remain independent in a home or a little bit more independent in a home. While the caregiver gives them a little bit of a chance to get out and do some things that they might have to do. So, I'm really excited about where ADT is headed and where the industry is headed in our ability to kind of repurpose and reimagine what a helpful home may be, what a helpful home for a caregiver may be, and we've got all kinds of different technologies that we can deploy to be utilized and reutilized, if you will, in some innovative ways. I say this quite often on the show that caregivers deal with three, what I call three I's. We become isolated, we lose our identity, and we lose our independence. So, the loss of identity, we'll put aside for just a little bit, that's something I focus on a lot on the show is helping caregivers speak from their own heart, but the isolation and the loss of independence. I have said this for some years now, that tech is a great way to offload that particular challenge, those particular challenges. Because we are so isolated in the nature of caring for somebody, but that independence loss for both the caregiver and the loved one, and 92% of people want to age in their own home. That ain't going to happen without tech.

It's not going to happen. So, then there's the factor of special needs families, you know, autism, for example, one of the biggest issues with autism for a lot of these kids is elopement. Kids will just walk off.

I've talked to more parents who spend a lot of sleepless nights because they're afraid and they have to come up with elaborate ways to make sure that child does not open the door and leave the house. You guys can speak to that. You guys have all kinds of stuff for that. Talk about that a little bit.

Okay, so absolutely. The best thing about the offerings and how the technology is developing is our ability to kind of customize based on those needs. We saw with COVID, there was a real drive to, let's talk about independence, first of all, to keep people in the place that they call home because they were maybe worried about moving into an assisted living facility because of all the stories that you heard during COVID. We feel like that served as an accelerant to enabling, using technology to keep people independent.

I can talk through a couple of those things. And when you talk about some of our automation devices that are coupled with or part of a home security offering, things like door sensors or motion detectors don't necessarily, while they certainly work very well as an intrusion detection device, they can also be utilized as an activity monitor. A door opens and I can get a chime or I can get a notification that, hey, the door opened. The ability to take those devices and set up schedules or scenes and control lights and locks and I can give you a couple of examples of how that might look for different scenarios.

You're talking about an autistic child not wanting a child to get out of the home. Obviously, we have connected locks that can lock the door and can be locked or opened. Couple that with a door motion sensor. If a parent's in a home and they're asleep, if a child gets up, the motion sensor could detect that there's activity in the house before the child even gets to the door. And rather than setting off a full-blown alarm where ADT would get a signal and assume that there was an intruder, the device, the system could be set up to bring a chime that's a different sound. And then the parent was like, no, hey, somebody woke up or somebody's moving around in the living room.

I can go check that out and see what's going on. Could potentially turn on a light so somebody doesn't trip over devices in between different times of the day. Those lights might not come on full blast because if you wake up in the middle of the night and you walk out into your living room, you may not want 100% lighting when you come out because it's going to blind you. You could set that up to come on at 10 or 15% like a nightlight so that I can see what's going on in the house and it's not going to necessarily blind me or startle me. Let me ask you something about that because a lot of people are afraid of technology. I don't know what I'm doing, that kind of stuff. Your technicians will help set all of this up.

Absolutely. We've got the ability to have preset scenes if you want or customized scenes. And one of the interesting things about how the technology is developed is you can set up different kind of if this happens, then do something else.

And based on your own personal needs, it's very easy to set those up. So you could say, if something happens which is an unexpected event, so if somebody gets up between the hours of midnight and 5am, I'm going to do why. So you can set up these unexpected events and trigger some sort of reaction from the home, from the other devices, a chime, an alert, a thing like that. A camera clip is one way to do it. So if you have a loved one who maybe you're not in the home with the loved one and in between those hours a door opens, you may get a clip on the camera to see what's going on. You could look at your phone and say, wait, it looked like mom just walked out the door.

And that applies to aging parents, particularly those with dementia. And this is becoming a real problem for a lot of folks. You get these silver alerts everywhere. Well, this is a way I've always felt like we could preempt those silver alerts. And a little bit of, let me switch, I'm just going to be lightning around you.

I just want to throw things at you. Because what about if you have firearms in the house? Do you have a mechanism of, not only you have a safe, you do all the things you need to safety and secure your weapons, but you still want to have one more thing of monitoring or some type of sensor on anything to get you a notification, boom, boom, boom, this is happening.

Absolutely. Our door window sensors are magnetic sensors and they basically work with any kind of door, something that would open could trigger an alarm. And again, when I say an alarm, I'm not saying a full blown burglar alarm, but an alarm or an interaction or some sort of chime to say, hey, this door opened. Or there's activity in, if you have a room that you want to keep people out of, a motion detector or a door window sensor could say, hey, there's activity in this room where I don't normally want people to be.

And you get a text immediately. You could get a text, you could get a clip from a camera that may be deployed in that room, and some may notice, hey, I can see who went in the room, and I can take action on that I can say, oh, that's a person that I'm okay with having in that room versus someone who I don't want in that room. We put a lot of door and window sensors on liquor cabinets for people who have teenagers to know what's going on there.

So there's all kinds of ways to do it. It's not necessarily, while perimeter security is certainly important from a secure kind of security aspect, it's not just that perimeter security. There's other things that you can set up with these home automation devices, cameras, sensors, to understand what's going on in the home. This is what I just love because I feel like that for the first time, a lot of caregivers are provided the opportunity to restructure the way they do the monitoring thereof.

Because they feel like they have to have hands on and eyes on at all times. And that is a recipe for disaster. So now we've got a tool that allows 24 hour vigilance over everything that you could possibly, just write a list of all the issues. And I guarantee you that there's some type of technical application of what you guys do that's going to resolve so many of those things.

And what a relief. The cameras that I mentioned, our cameras have a speaker microphone built into them, you can do two way talk through a camera. So, again, from a perspective of say securing a gun safe or whatnot, you could talk to somebody through the camera and say, hey, what are you doing in there, get out of there, whatnot. But also you could interact with a loved one remotely through your phone.

And one of the great things about it, if you're saying caring for a senior. You may want to make sure mom or dad's OK. And you can either set up an expected or an unexpected event where they get up out of bed or you know that they've gotten up out of bed and you want to you want to wait for them to wake up before you talk to them. And you're not going to rouse them out of their sleep. You could say, hey, set the camera and I'll get a clip that mom walked out of the living room and I can talk to the cameras. Hey, mom, how are you?

How are you feeling today? Well, they have sensors that are in the bed under the mattress and release the pressure of that. And then it'll send a text if you could do an algorithm or some kind of thing or say, you know, if then if if this is not back in one and a half hours kind of thing, then we're going to check on mom to make sure she's OK. She hasn't gotten up and fall in the middle of the night kind of thing. And this allows seniors to have a little bit more agency in their life and independence, but knowing that they're protected and safe. They don't have to leave their home. One of the issues, Andy, for a lot of seniors, particularly if there's any kind of dementia. But but for all of us, as we get older, is that when we get out of our own familiar environments, whatever cognitive slowdown we're having will be exacerbated.

Sure. So staying in the home is really paramount for so many. I've had this conversation with my own parents and we're exploring all the opportunities by my brothers and my sister and I are looking at ways that we can do this. Mom and dad are probably not going to manage this kind of stuff. Dad is dad got it. He was a captain of the Navy, a pastor for 60 years, got his doctorate and he never bothered to learn computers. And I'm like, Dad, really? Why? So I give up.

Mom is very good with computers, but she's lost a lot of her vision, so she can't see very well. So it's on us. And that brings us to my final point with you is that so many caregivers are the purchasing agent. We're the ones driving this need. And we don't have to be incredibly technical, technologically astute, do we, for all this?

Not at all. You do not need to be a programmer. You can do a lot of these automations on your phone. Our technicians, when they do an installation, can certainly help you set that up. Hey, what are you trying to accomplish? We've got some pre-canned ones that we'd want to do where you set a scene at night, go to bed scene, you press the button on your phone and the lights turn off, the doors lock, the system arms itself.

It becomes very simple. But one of the things that you bring up there around, particularly seniors, not necessarily having the tech savviness or interest in dealing with technology or computers in general. We spend a lot of time around, like, what are the best interfaces for those folks to interact with? And one of the ones that we found that's become a real, it's one that's very well adopted, particularly by seniors, is using your voice as the interface. So we recently partnered with Google on using a lot of their home automation devices in our ADT systems and our sales reps are beginning to sell Google and Nest devices as well as install them. And the Google Home device that you can speak through, you can call through, you can talk to one another through, you can ask it to do things in your house has become a really great interface because it's intuitive. And it's also, if you have, you know, eyesight issues, it's easy for you to use, you just talk to it, you say, hey, Google, do X, Y, and Z, or, you know, hey, Google, I'm going to bed, set the house up for good night mode or things like that, that are very easy to interact with. Set up is easy, like I said, through the phone, and it gives you that ability for a caregiver to check in on somebody, mom wants bed, and then she locked the door, is the door locked? Either you set it up as part of the scene, or you can just push a button and lock the door.

Close the garage door is another one. It's very easy to do those kinds of things. Do you have an interface with Alexa? We do. Okay, good.

Because that's what we do here. And I got to tell you, my wife and Alexa, I listen to her argue with Alexa on a regular basis. And one time I came home and she was in her wheelchair and she was trying to program Alexa for some stuff. And then she looked at me, she said, I've had it with you know who, because she can't say her name because it'll turn on.

And smoke was coming out of her ear. And she said, I've had it. I'm going to trade her in for Google. I've just had it. I've had it.

I've just had it. And I looked over at the Alexa tower. And I said, Alexa, how are you feeling? I swear, this is a true story. Alexa actually, I have witnesses said, to be honest, it's been a pretty rough day.

And I thought, my wife has broken Amazon, which I can understand this. So these are the kind of interfaces that I wanted people to understand that can be done. I'm going to, you back me up if I got this right. I think before you call ADT, I would ask each of you as listening to this right now, make a list of the pressure points that you have right now, something that you would want. You're not going to get a comprehensive list because they're going to come up with things that you won't. But at least you can start that process. And then that'll ping pong some ideas around for both you and the technician. But give a call to folks. And I mean, write that list down of all the things that you feel like would be very helpful for you to have to monitor, to give your loved ones some more agency, to give you peace of mind.

That's kind of the whole point. And then also do it for yourself, not just for your loved one, do it for yourself too. And there are ways that you can offload some of the stress. What we carry is enough. Let's find the right partner to help us do this better.

Okay. So Andy, if people want to get in touch or find out more, what is the best way? You can go to our website, ADT.com. If you're more interested in some of our senior specific products, ADT.com backslash health. And when I say senior specific, we also have a large line we haven't spoken a lot about of personal emergency response devices, PERS devices where we have a pendant in a box, a fall detection pendant that folks can wear around the house, a waterproof device. We also have on the go devices that can go outside the house if you're more independent and tend to travel.

Those devices can trigger assistance where you would push the button and get help from ADT. That's probably the best way to go is because depending on what you want, the security and home automation side is available there. The PERS side is available there as well for seniors.

And that's probably the best place to go. That brings me to one last point. This is important. Can you have a situation where if emergency personnel are called to the scene, that there is some type of communication interface of here are some specific meds or medical conditions to be aware of before they even get to the scene? Is there some kind of interface for that or in the works? You can set that up with notes on an account so that our agent when they come on they would see specific notes and when they're talking to an emergency contact or when they're talking to emergency services can relay that information.

They're diabetic, they have epilepsy, they have Alzheimer's, that kind of thing. Exactly. I know on our PERS side, we offer a lockbox. It's a low tech device but it's a key lockbox so if somebody were to fall or sometimes people get stuck in their furniture. They're like, hey, I can't get off my couch.

Can you call the neighbor? I've been there for me. That's me, though.

That's me binging. No, I'm just kidding. And rather than having somebody have to break the door down which was just, you know, a terrible thing to have to happen to you, you know, we can give the code to the lockbox to that caregiver the emergency services they pull out a key and get in the house. So it's like a real estate type lockbox so that's we can interact and provide that information. Then we also provide follow up to our, the whole emergency contact list as to what's going on to keep them in the loop, as well as you may get a notification on your app depending on how how your system is set up that this is happening, your alarm went off for this, this, this interaction happened you can get notifications placed as well.

And I would be I'd be remiss to, if I didn't mention Peter. One of the shining star with ADT is our monitoring agents are top notch. They're all ADT employees, and that's really important when you think about this like, who are the people that you're going to be calling. We don't have contract monitoring we have ADT employees are specially trained on our senior care products those purse products they're specially trained in in senior sensitivity issues and issues around being empathetic to what folks are going, going through to the generation can impact your, your, your eyesight, how are the conditions can can make it difficult to interact we train them on that. They're second to none, and they're really important. To a caregiver to know that you got somebody there, who is, who's not going to just, you know, they're not just phoning it in literally and figuratively they really are engaged in, in the customers needs in the client's needs, and, and they know that when they get a call like this that there's a lot of drama and they are prepared to speak into it with clarity.

That's a huge help Andy. Absolutely and and and we cover on our website there are examples of we have these events called lifesaver events we do them frequently throughout the year and it's somebody had an event. Our agent came on got them the help they needed. Most of them as the title says somebody's life was saved for for whatever reason whether it's fire carbon monoxide event or some other type of event. And they're really heartwarming we reunite the agent who made the call the technician who installed the system we bring the first responders in the came in and, and they're really heartwarming kind of stories that they put a face to what we do every day.

I tell the employees at work for me frequently I'm like this. This is it not no knock on cable TV. When the cable TV go goes out it's bad if it's during the Super Bowl it's really bad, but you know you're on call every day, every time we get a signal it's, there's a high likelihood that it's somebody whose life is potentially in jeopardy, and those agents are top notch at what they do. That is deeply me and I know that has to be very very meaningful to you guys as a company to realize that at the end of the day.

This is what you're about is, is you're dealing with people's drama and and trauma. And to know that you're speaking into it with that kind of clarity and training and compassion is is a huge help and this is why I'm so glad to have you on the show today this is a part of the caregivers journey I know I've been there have done that, and still do I am. I remember being up in DC with now Senator Marsha Blackburn but at the time she's representative and she's working on a big infrastructure bill of high, high speed internet and rural areas and broadband and rural areas which is a big part of what we're trying to do here with this type of service. And, and so I was speaking to them and, and I gave the example that like that day I had.

I was in Washington, my wife was back in Nashville when we lived there at the time. And I let the technician into the house through my phone for them to draw blood and do the things to do and then they were able to leave, and, and I was able to secure the home after they left, all from my phone while I was doing a press thing with Senator Blackburn, it drove the point home. This is why we're doing this.

It's not just for kicks and giggles and fun and hey in this kind of cool look what I can do. It's, this is a huge help because it allowed me to really literally be in two places at the same time, and make sure my wife was cared for and that's why you guys are so important to this journey. ADT. ADT.com. Yes, and then you got all kinds of sub menus there of the seniors. Absolutely. Take a look, and this is Andy Droney and he has been a tremendous help and insight today into what's available to us as caregivers, please take advantage of this. Do not sit there and white knuckle this by yourself. You've got a whole team of people that can help you right now.

ADT.com. This is Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger. Andy, thank you so much. We're going to have you back on. Okay, great.

I love to come back on. It's been my pleasure, Peter. Really, thank you. Thank you so much. All right, we got to go. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers.

We'll see you next time. Hey, this is Peter Rosenberger and I hope you've enjoyed this podcast as much as we've enjoyed bringing it to you. I like to find interesting ideas that maybe people haven't thought of that connect to the family caregiver. I'm in my 35th year of this. I know the journey for fellow caregivers. It is a tough journey, and I am just passionate about equipping my fellow caregivers to stay strong and healthy while taking care of somebody who is not.

That is my life, and I know it's the life of so many others. And if you know a caregiver, maybe you're not a caregiver, you've enjoyed this podcast, but you know of a caregiver that's really struggling and you don't know what to say, don't worry about it. I do know what to say.

Get them a copy of my book. I speak fluent caregivers. It's called Hope for the Caregiver or Seven Caregiver Landmines and How You Can Avoid Them.

Either one of those things. They're available wherever books are sold. There's an audio version of Hope for the Caregiver.

It's on a bridge. I read the whole thing. I got a CD called Songs for the Caregiver that a lot of people are getting for loved ones who are in hospice or nursing homes or dementia patients, kids with autism. It just settles them down. I play hymns throughout the whole thing, and then Gracie sings about half a dozen, and she's a world-class singer. Speaking of which, if you go out to hopeforthecaregiver.com and you'll see a donation button, you can do a tax-deductible gift to this organization, and you will get a copy of Gracie's CD just as our gift to you. It's called Resilient, and she is indeed resilient, and you're going to love the music that we put out there for you. There are a lot of different resources, so please take advantage of them. Thank you again for being a part of what we're doing here at Hope for the Caregiver, and we look forward to the next episode.