Virtual home

Today my brother and his wife returned to France. I'm staying with my father for a few days, but from here on, he will have some days completely on his own; the housekeepers only visit twice a week and I won't be able to visit every day.

I got to thinking that rather than relying on phone calls to keep in touch, with all the formality of that sort of conversation, what I want to achieve is a kind of permanently on video/audio intercom between my father's house, my home (wherever that will be) and maybe my brother's and grandmother's home.

The idea is that instead of consciously making a call, we're online all the time. At anytime we can call out, and everyone will here. In reality, what's the difference between this and living in a big house! I think this might break the feeling of isolation that my father could feel.

Also, I spend a lot of time working at my pc, why shouldn't the webcam be permanently on whilst I'm working, if he wants to see me and chat whilst I'm working that's fine, and just like being in his company.

To do this we're going to have to put microphones and speakers throughout our homes and probably use a permanently open skype connection. It'll drop out sometimes, but we can just restart it.

So far everyone seems keen.

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.

The project begins

This blog will describe our ongoing efforts to provide a comfortable and safe home for our father to live in.

So that you can understand the problems we will have to overcome, here's a brief history explaining how we got here.

Our father was a fit and young 67 year old at the turn of the millennium. Suddenly he was struck with meningitis which was undiagnosed for over the week.

The result was that he was to stay in a coma (level 3 on the glasgow scale) for 72 days, during which other errors led to other life threatening illnesses.

Despite having almost no chance of living he survived.

He had suffered brain damage and was initially unable to walk. But with the immense efforts and love of our mother he recovered the ability to walk and many of his faculties and eventually re-passed his driving test.

Unfortunately his condition deteriorated for unknown reasons and with no help from the medical establishment this has remained a mystery. The result was he became increasingly unsteady on his feet, and relied on the patience and care of our mother.

Two and a half years ago our mother was diagnosed with leukaemia, and on September 7th 2007, after a brave, brave battle, our mother died aged 69.

And now .... what to do?

We want our father to live in his own home, as independently as possible. All of these illnesses have been a burden to all of us, and we too need to resume some normality in our lives.

This project, project M (M for Maggie), describes what we have done, are doing, and will do to make this happen. There must be thousands of other families with this problem or worse. Maybe this project will provide some guidance, and maybe someone can help to guide us.

In memory of an amazing person, our mother.