Nursing Home Patients Need Drop In Feature Or Caller Ability To Accept Call For Them!
I and many in my economic niche would absolutely love this device and eagerly buy it but so far cannot because the fact that it lacks an automatic drop in option renders it virtually useless to those of us who are purchasing these types of devices for an individual who has dementia or Alzheimer’s and is living in a memory care nursing home. And unfortunately these members of our communities are so often completely forgotten about when it comes to product innovation as more often than not they are the forgotten family members (forgotten by the rest of society that is, but certainly not by their families!) These valuable and very valued family members simply NEED to have a feature made available that would allow the caller to be able to initiate a video call without the requirement of the other party having to be able to accept the call first in order to receive it, press a button or speak a verbal command as it is critical to understand here that as their disease progresses they will become less capable of being able to use a telephone and eventually completely incapable of operating any sort of technological device on their own without substantial help, and even speech for voice commands is something most will eventually lose, if they can even manage to remember the vocal commands or even manage to continue to be able to read eventually or if they still can, they often will not remember to look at something like a post it note on the side of the TV screen saying, “to answer wife’s call, say aloud, “[whatever command is],”and therefore cannot utilize a remote or a verbal command to accept the video call. However this does not mean that it is not just as important and extremely critical that these individuals have daily access to being able to both see and hear from their loved ones on a regular basis in order to be able to maintain speech and identity recognition for the longest possible duration. Many of these patients are bedridden and there is very little accessible space and area to set up a display type of device like an Amazon echo show and therefore the portal from Facebook was initially extremely exciting to hear about, especially also because of the ability to turn the volume up loud for individuals who are struggling with hearing on top of all of these other issues. The lack of a need to have to mount anything on a wall that is to the side of their bed or on a stand that is to the side of their bed and being able to utilize the TV which is usually positioned right in front of them and these days TVs are big enough that even without glasses on, many patients with even excessively bad vision, are provided with TVs that are large enough that they can clearly see who it is they are looking at from across the room in their bed without their glasses on. Everything about this is absolutely perfect except for the fact that we cannot control their ability to accept the call from our end and it would be nice if we could also control the volume from our end. Or have a drop in feature where it is not necessary to except the call at all and it just goes through automatically. That would make all the difference and would make this device FINALLY, The one and only perfect solution out there that so far is yet to exist in this world which would allow perfect seamless communication between families and their nursing home bound relatives. Especially during the pandemic situation we’re in right now so many of us still have forms of very limited access to our family members. Please please consider this and consider making this change swiftly as many of us have a very elderly relatives who may not have much time left and don’t have two or three years for Facebook to think about this and debate it and then take even longer to you create an upgrade and release it. I implore you to please consider this and from the marketing side of things, Facebook would certainly have the claim to fame of having the only truly suitable home to nursing home communication device on the market. There are no others. The closest it comes after this is The Amazon echo show which is perfect in the opposite ways of the Facebook portal. It allows the drop in feature the way that is needed but does not allow us to utilize it on a television screen where we have the benefit of loud volume and large image as well as little difficulty with finding placement for a screen. Thank you for taking the time to seriously consider this and please, I implore whomever is reading this to please forward this message up the chain of command that it might be seen by whomever has the authority to make quick executive decisions and changes to product features and policies. Our community (those of us who are families with family members who have dementia or Alzheimer’s and have their family member living institutionalized full time amidst the pandemic) will be eagerly awaiting seeing these changes implemented and hopefully by Christmas this year 2021 as I am literally in touch on forums currently with a hundred or so different people who would rush right out to buy this as soon as these changes are made as many of us already ran right out to buy one of these as soon as we discovered them only to be let down in the store while inquiring about features or else purchased this item only to have to return it the next day after discovering that it was not a device our family members could effectively use to communicate with home :(
-
Brent Walker commented
Facebook, are you listening? There are a lot of us that would purchase this product if it supported drop-in feature. I, too, have a parent with dimentia and would replace my echo show with it if this feature was supported. From what I can tell on reddit and other google searches, many many other folks would switch as well.
Please consider adding ASAP. I would buy it now if it was supported.