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Ask Slashdot: Bulletproof Video Conferencing For Alzheimers Home?
Milo_Mindbender writes I'm trying to find a bulletproof near zero maintenance video conferencing client for shared use in an Alzheimers living facility. It's used so the patients can regularly see their relatives who are often out of town. Most everything I've tried on PC or Mac requires tweeks/updates from time to time to keep it working, not good in a place where there are no computer savvy people. It looks like most of the low cost dedicated boxes have died out too. The ideal setup will be turnkey with little-to-no maintenance and if possible support auto-answering calls from approved users. It needs to be compatible with video conferencing apps the relatives can easily get on phone/tablet/pc such as Skype, Facetime, Hangouts...etc. Any suggestions?
Or how about you just buy the video phones like
http://www.sophiesystems.com/g...
There are some that are skype compatible. You can then encourage the families to buy a video phone or if they are tech savy they could skype as well.
For distant relatives that were not tech savvy, I did this. Worked very well over the years with several times a week usage. The iPad 2 that was left there was loaded with iOS 5 and was not able to do the on-air updates Apple pushes out now.
It worked fine until I had a chance to visit at the end of last year where I updated it to iOS 7 and the latest everything. Still works.
This is about as bulletproof as you can get. Even the UI (once FaceTime is set up properly) is easy to manage. It chimes with the name of the caller, swipe and you are talking.
Added bonuses are:
Lots of people already own Apple devices, so they have everything they need.
You can use the lowest model offered by Apple (iPad 2, non-retina mini) to keep the costs down as much as possible.
Devices can be locked down as much as desired
Development costs are cheap, you can get a dev license for $99 and roll out your own app ad-hoc (but you will have to renew and redeploy once a year before the dev cert expires). Still, no app is really necessary.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Splab, thank you.
Thank you for giving us an a *perfect* example, in the wild, of *exactly* how techies answer questions condescendingly & with making big assumptions, but most importantly, demonstrating you have a high level of technical knowledge, but not ***ACTUALLY FIXING THE PROBLEM***
People like you have been making tech obnoxious for decades, and it needs to stop. /. bear witness:
It is perfect. All the elements are there. This kind of response typifies interactions between people with tech problems and those who claim to be able to fix them.
First, obviously OP was asking about **low maintenence for everyone** not just one subset. This is the language voodoo. Conjuring a dichotomy of meaning where there is none.
2nd, we see the dork/troll complete the circle by insinuating that OP was ("obviously!") being unreasonable thinking they could get something at required **absolutely** no maintenence...for that he's, of course, "shit out of luck"
But OP didn't as for "absolutely no maintenence"...but for the dork/troll that doesn't matter. This whole thing was a way for parent to demonstrate superiority by dropping some jargon & then making the original person out to be dumb for ever asking the question.
***WE MUST STOP DOING THIS FOREVER***
It's ruining our industry, and our work life quality. People hate a person who (having demonstrated their technical knowledge by dropping jargon) wastes their time.
When people need help, it's wrong to use that as an opportunity to make yourself look smarter. It only makes everything worse, and it causes the other person to hate you and tech in general.
Just stop. Forever. The whole routine...let's just end it...
Thank you Dave Raggett