What do you do when you are a full time carer and you work full time? You make your house a SMART home. Today the cost of care provision if you have savings and capital greater than £14342 will be at latest estimate £85 per week. I care for my 82 year old father who is a dialysis patient three times a week and is registered disabled. I formerly also cared at home for my 79 year old mother who passed away with MND. Automating the house with Alexa has been one of those lifelong learning journeys.

Initially I was only using Alexa to speed up the compiling of shopping lists. Previously we were printing out a standard Google Doc with all of the regular items added to the list. Additional items were added to the white border around the table. A labourious process each week consuming paper and ink. However, persuading mother to speak to the Alexa first generation Echo unit placed in the kitchen was never going to work for long. As she developed Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and lost her ability to speak this also made the verbal addition of items to an Alexa shopping or to do list irrelevant. Dysarthia is experienced by 80% of MND sufferers. She was still able to use a stylus for a while to use the input function on the Alexa app on an Amazon Fire Tablet. The speech therapists helping her at the time were pushing using an iPad. Having never been a fan of Apple products from a cost point of view I was all for finding alternative apps as there was no budget to provide an iPad. We found a suitable text to speech app Just Talk which was adequate but a better App should be available. Eventually the ability to hold a pen was lost so we relied upon a chart to point to letters which I then recorded with pen and paper. I did not have time to develop a similar app. While this was going on my father was not really understanding the nature and progressive development of her MND so communication became non existent between the couple. 

While mother was still able to write we experimented with the Oxford Campus Project Book system. We bought an A5 book which has markers on the page that a Smartphone with Scribzee App. Initially the book was useful and I was able to record some of her thoughts she had written. As the MND progressed this again ceased.

While mother was coping with the initial problems of MND I started investigating the use of Internet of Things enabled devices. As I have been using Amazon products for a lot of years, the use of Fire Tablets and the Alexa app was the natural progression. An Amazon Echo First Generation was also purchased along with a Smart Plug. The Nokia 1 phone I had at this time was reasonable for the majority of tasks what I wanted to do but had not really been able to scan QR codes. The installation of the Alexa app on this and and the use of the Fire tablets enabled me to readily connect the Smart Plug. This was intially used to control the outside garden lights that had been wired by my father into a 13 Amp plug and connected to a double socket in the shed. This in turn was connected to a separate fused consumer unit in the shed. My father, a now retired Electrical Engineer and NICEE registered contractor, did this installation about 30 years ago. Still fully functioning to the extent that it supports in addition a monitor inside to which a Raspberry Pi Zero is attached which allows experimentation with the Internet of Things. Looking forward to next year setting up a full weather station, motion activated night cam and birdbox cameras.  We have the necessary number of Raspberry Pi 4s plus Zeros and associated electronics to bring the square foot gardening experience to a monitor in the house. By converting an old Chromebook to run on the Raspbian OS it will be possible to Chromecast I think to the main large screen TV in the lounge to bring the garden experience indoors to the SMART Home.