First steps

Just before our mother died, thinking that she might have some visits at home, realizing that our father was declining and our mother increasingly frail, we persuaded our father to buy a stairlift so he can go up and down stairs more easily.

This has been fantastic. We found a lift that turns the corner of the stairs, and can pass in front of a doorway WITHOUT blocking it!

This was the first necessary step completed.

Since our mother's death, my brother has been living in the house with his wife, but on the 25th October he will need to return to his home in the south of France.

In this time, we have come up with the following, tentative strategy.

Inititially we won't have a live in housekeeper, instead a housekeeper will visit him to cook and clean on Mondays and Thursdays.

Our main worry is that he will fall when there is no one in the house. He has got a panic button, but we still have the fear that he could fall or suffer an illness and not be able to raise an alarm.

The solution so far... we've installed 6 wifi enabled motorized cameras throughout the house.

The model we chose was the Panasonic BC 131, which is motorized, uses wifi, has sound, and has motion detection.

These cameras contain a webserver and do not require a pc to be left on in the home. You can log in through your broadband router (you'll need to set up port forwarding) from anywhere in the world and monitor and move any camera. Obviously we encourage him to temporarily switch a camera off when he needs privacy. The image and motion quality of these cameras are more than adequate to the task in hand. In fact we're thinking of installing them in

We don't know how this is all going to work out, but these cameras are one step towards helping this project along.