Arlyn Anderson grasped her father’s hand.
“A nursing home would be safer, Dad,” she told him. “No way,” Jim
Anderson interjected. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy
Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake
Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before.
Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades
earlier to be near her parents. Now, in 2013, she was fiftysomething
and finding that her father’s decline was all-consuming.Her father—an inven-
tor, pilot, sailor, and
general Mr. Fix-It—
started experiencing
bouts of paranoia, a sign
of Alzheimer’s, in his
mid-eighties.
Arlyn’s house was a
40-minute drive from
the cottage, and she had
been relying on a patch-
work of technology to
keep tabs on her dad.
She set an open laptop on the counter
so she could chat with him on Skype.
She installed a camera in his kitchen
and another in his bedroom so she
could check whether he had fallen.
When she read about a new eldercare
service called Care.coach a few weeks
after broaching the subject of a nursing
home, it piqued her interest. For about
$200 a month, a computerized avatar(controlled remotely by a
human caregiver) would
watch over a home-
bound person 24 hours
a day; Arlyn paid that
much for just nine hours
of in-home help. She
signed up immediately.
A Google tablet ar-
rived a week later. Fol-
lowing the instructions,
Arlyn uploaded dozens
of pictures to the ser-
vice’s online portal, including images
of family members and Jim’s boat.
Then, she and her sister Layney Ander-
son presented the tablet to Jim. “Here,
Dad. We got you this.”
An animated German shepherd ap-
peared and started to talk in the same
female voice you hear when using
Google Maps or other Google apps.
Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold,Jim and his seven-year-old
daughter Arlyn, at home
in 196890 dec 2018 ✦ jan 2019
Reader’s Digest