This Innovative Company Is Helping Caregivers Keep Tabs on Aging Parents
Nearly 48 million people are caregivers, with a whopping 26 percent of Americans caring for someone with dementia. That’s led to the rise of a range of products to help provide support. The latest: Nomo Smart Care’s Nomo Essential Care Kit. The kit features a set of motion and sound-sensing devices: a hub, satellite, and […]
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Nearly 48 million people are caregivers, with a whopping 26 percent of Americans caring for someone with dementia. That’s led to the rise of a range of products to help provide support. The latest: Nomo Smart Care’s Nomo Essential Care Kit.
The kit features a set of motion and sound-sensing devices: a hub, satellite, and tags to help caregivers keep an eye on loved ones when they’re not physically with them, to empower aging Americans to have more independence and be able to live at home.
Nomo is unlike anything else on the market for caregiving right now. You control the motion and sound sensors with an app, and it works to collect data on your loved one’s regular movements and alerts you if something is off with their schedule. The hub also serves as a two-way communication device, so caregivers can talk to loved ones (and vice versa). There’s even an emergency response button if a loved one needs to call for help.
Nomo’s app can be shared by caregivers, allowing family members to share notes about doctor’s visits, new medications, dietary needs, and more.
“We believe that Nomo will allow people to age at home, which is, overwhelmingly, where seniors want to live,” says Mike O’Shaughnessy, CEO of Nomo. “In most cases, these seniors living at home are quite capable of living at home, provided they have help. We believe Nomo is the missing ingredient for many of them—a tool that doesn’t require that they do anything.”
The Essential Care Kit monitors a person’s daily activity and looks for deviations from the norm that is then flagged on an app for caregivers. “It places no burden nor lifestyle change on the senior care recipient,” O’Shaughnessy says. “On the other hand, we believe Nomo empowers caregivers with meaningful and powerful data about their loved ones.”
The kit allows caregivers to track daily tasks like activities in the kitchen, bed, and bathrooms, letting caregivers know if a senior has opened a cabinet to take their medicine, opened the fridge to eat, or left the home by themselves. It also picks up on routines to signal if a loved one is following their usual schedule. “Families will benefit by knowing that their loved one is going about the daily routine consistently from one day to the next,” O’Shaughnessy says.
Dianne Russell is the main caregiver for her 96-year-old father, who lives down the street from her and has dementia. While she is typically with him several times a day, her father has struggled with falls and leaving the house alone. “He has walked outside without a stitch of clothes on before,” she says.
Russell tried the Nomo Essential Care Kit and found that it’s helpful when used together with cameras she has set up in her father’s home. “I put tags on the doors, so I know when someone is coming or going,” she says. “But I also check my cameras to see if it’s someone visiting or if he’s leaving the house.”
Russell also put a tag on her father’s walker to signal to her if he’s moving around his home or if there’s a chance that he’s fallen. “If the walker is not moving, I check the cameras to see if he’s on the floor,” she says.
Her father’s refrigerator has also been tagged, but Russell says that hasn’t been as helpful for her. “At this stage of his dementia, he goes to the fridge, opens it up, and stares for an hour,” she says. “He doesn’t know to get the food out.”
But Russell says she likes the hub’s emergency alert button, and that the hub tells her where in the home her father is. “It doesn’t pick up his cat—just him,” she says. “I know exactly which camera to turn on to see what he’s doing.”
Russell says the system would be better for her needs if it came with cameras. But, in conjunction with her existing tools, she says it’s given her more information on her father’s whereabouts and safety when she’s not with him.
“Caregiving is tough—there is no way around that,” says Elizabeth Luth, Ph.D., a core faculty member at the Rutgers Institute for Health and assistant professor in the department of family medicine and community health. She notes that loved ones with dementia often require “many hours of care a day,” including things like managing finances and medical appointments, taking medication, food preparation, bathing, and dressing. “Behavioral outbursts are also common in persons with dementia, which can be distressing for caregivers,” she says.
Luth also notes that caregiver resources are “often insufficient” and can vary a lot, depending on where you live. “Local chapters of the Alzheimer’s Association organize free support groups that caregivers can join, often with an option to attend virtually,” she says. “Adult day centers may provide activities for persons living with dementia to give caregivers a break.”
Ultimately, O’Shaughnessy says that Nomo is just trying to make lives easier and hopes that “Nomo is a game-changer for anyone engaged in caregiving.”
