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How Can I Build a Portable "Dead-Man's" Switch?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the in-the-event-of-death dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a widower caring for my very disabled child. I have family who check in on me often, but not reliably, and not every day. How can I rig up a 'dead-man's switch' that will alert family or emergency services should something happen to me, so that my child can be cared for? Her medical needs are significant enough that being alone for even an hour could be fatal for her. We do occasionally get out of the house, so a GPS type cellphone and a heart-rate monitor watch would seem to be the ticket, but how to link the two and get the desired dialing behaviour?"

14 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Bad Do-It-Yourself Idea by SirLoadALot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If we are talking about a serious system here, you aren't going to be able to do this yourself. Just for starters, think about how complicated this would be if you decide to have a shower. You will have to deactivate the whole shooting match and then get it all back up and running again afterwards. Of course, if you slip in the shower, you're screwed. There are already solutions out there that you can sign up for. One that I have seen is a pendant you wear around your neck that has a button on it. One push, and your relatives are notified by phone. Or, fail to push the button on a regular basis and a phone call comes from the monitoring service, who can also dispatch 911, etc. Finally, at the risk of being harsh, if you truly believe you may die suddenly with no notice at any time, you seriously need to reconsider your current care arrangements. You do not strike me as qualifying to care for some with the needs you imply in your question. Please take this as honest advice, not a flame.

    1. Re:Bad Do-It-Yourself Idea by dr_dank · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You do not strike me as qualifying to care for some with the needs you imply in your question. Please take this as honest advice, not a flame.

      As hard as this might be for submitter to admit, I have to agree. Around the clock care, be it in the home from a nursing service or in a residential facility can be expensive, but there may be a sliding scale available via some organizations according to need. Chances are that there is an organization that caters to the submitters daughter's specific condition or circumstance.

      This is too important to trust to a Rube Goldberg contraption that one of us dingbats on Slashdot recommended.

      --
      Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
    2. Re:Bad Do-It-Yourself Idea by dr_dank · · Score: 2, Insightful

      However peculiar the question, the answer is obviously more of the order of the possibly blunt 'go shopping' type than this crass and insensitive response.

      Giving the submitter a shopping list and ignoring the ramifications of what he is attempting to do does him no favors. If the submitter is sincere, he has been widowed and has 100% of the extremely demanding burden of caring for a very disabled child. I feel for him and do not envy his position in the least. As heartbreaking as it is, he may need to make a difficult choice for the better of his child rather than rely on gadgetry to save his daughter's life.

      if you think the availability of an outside agency to help is all that is needed to solve his problem, you have no idea what his problem is.

      Unless the submitter's daughter suffers from a condition that nobody knows anything about but the submitter, then you'd have a point that submitter, and only submitter, can care for his child.

      Realistically speaking, a trained professional (or a team of them, in the case of round-the-clock care or residential facilty) can better handle the situation.

      Think about it: if the situation is so dire and delicate that even an hour missed can kill the child, then single-parent caregiver scenario is either going to end in one of two ways: the inadvertent death of the child at worst or the burnout and breakdown of submitter, at best.

      --
      Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
  2. Re:Cell Phone, for now... by RevAaron · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Carrying a full-blown cell phone is precisely what this bloke seems to expect- if you've found solutions that include that, perhaps you could share?

    Frankly, the poster's situation sounds serious enough that a $20/month cell phone bill is the least of his worries.

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  3. Re:The Japanese have done this. by Maximum+Prophet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hmm, you could look at the water meter, and if they haven't used any water in a day, as long as they don't have any automatic waterering devices or leaking toilets, it would tell them that there was a problem. The automatic devices and leaks could probably be detected and compensated for with fuzzy logic. Apartments without water meters would have to have one installed, not a real big problem.

    --
    All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
  4. Doctor. by daeg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Talk to your doctor. You do not want a DIY solution when someone's life depends on it.

    You may also want to look into a managed care facility. You may be able to get them to accept both you and your child so you could continue to care for the child.

  5. One has to ask... by csoto · · Score: 4, Insightful

    if the dibility is such that life is at risk after one hour, why isn't the child in a care facility where they receive more than one person's care? Sometimes you think you're doing what's best for your children, but you're not.

    --
    There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
    1. Re:One has to ask... by Thumper_SVX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'd mod you up for this (I have mod points), but I want to post on this and say that a close friend of mine went through the exact same thing when his wife passed away earlier this year. His severely disabled child needed almost constant care, and despite the pain it caused him when I said it to him (and the pain it caused when he did it), he checked his child into a managed care facility. He knew that without his wife's help, he wouldn't be able to effectively work for a living. Without working, the quality of life he and his son shared would have degraded to the point that he would no longer be able to care for his son effectively anyway.

      When I first said it to him over a drink shortly after the funeral, he didn't talk to me for almost 3 months. When he finally did call, he apologized and told me I had been right, and that putting his son in the care facility was the right thing to do.

      As it stands, he spends every weekend and most weeknights with his son, and their quality of life has never been better.

      Just food for thought.

  6. This would be easy... by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... if her medical needs weren't "significant enough that being alone for even an hour could be fatal for her." An hour is just too small of a window to accomplish anything useful without having so many false alarms that your family won't take the alerts seriously anymore. You really need to re-evaluate your living conditions.

    --
    http://outcampaign.org/
  7. How old is your child? by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This seems to be a strange way to approach the problem. Your worry is that your child won't be able to live for long if you can't provide the proper care for her. Then, wouldn't it be better to give her a way of asking for care to be provided?

    Assuming she's old enough, and not severely mentally disabled, this would seem to be the better option. After all, you could be perfectly alive and still be in a situation where you can't get to her fast enough.

  8. Re:Yeah, I guess I should give up on this insulin. by Max+Threshold · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I know I'm responding to a troll, but this brings up a serious point. Millions of people are walking around (and reproducing) who by all rights of nature should be dead. Are we weakening ourselves as a species? I think so...

  9. Re:try shopping by honkycat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Based on the information we're given, I think the only compassionate answer is "don't do this yourself." If a person's life depends on the reliability of this solution, trying to come up with a clever hack is just plain irresponsible. In that case, you really need to buy a tested off-the-shelf solution.

  10. Re:The Japanese have done this. by Trogre · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Dead-mans switch on the toilet flusher? Surely most elderly people would use this every day (and night).

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  11. Re:Large, gaping holes can be quite an indicator by orasio · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Obviously, there is a way to use everything to kill people.
    The issue is that slashdot posts are not the output of the brightest minds in the world, just the average knowledge of an engineer. And most people who want to kill others in big quantities, can hire an engineer, or have on of them in their organization.
    I think we should safely think that /. is not the place where someone would go for advice when trying to kill other people. It's too easily traceable, and might warn the victims, without providing anything special that couldn't be aquired through a more traditional channel.