How To Care For Elderly Parents With Ooma Telo

Caring for aging parents is about to get easier. With the pressures of daily life, you might not be able to visit in person often. If your family members have health issues or chronic illnesses, seeing them takes on added importance that can be emotionally trying. You need a way to easily stay in touch.

How the Ooma Telo helps solve long-term care problems for family members.

When your loved ones have health issues, a regular phone call is not good enough. For example, what if your aging parents have anxiety and are really stressed? It is difficult to tell if people are coping with those difficulties over a traditional phone call. You need the ability to have a richer conversation so you can request professional help when it is needed.

The Ooma Telo home phone service is easy to use. There is no need to download apps or buy a new headset. That means your elderly parents can pick up the phone and make a call fast. That ease of use is especially important if your elderly parents and family members struggle with learning new technology. In addition to ease of use, the high definition (HD) service quality means you can hear every single word on the call so you can focus on the conversation instead of asking family members to repeat themselves. 

Keep family members informed when there is an incident.

In an emergency situation, especially involving family, you may feel a flood of worry and mental stress about your family. You might not be in the best frame of mind to inform family and friends about the situation, instead worrying about your elderly relative. Ooma’s auto-text notification capability means you don’t have to bear the mental stress of wondering who you have and haven’t informed about the emergency—the system takes care of that communication for you.  

An Ooma customer recently shared with us how an elderly relative calling 911 impacted the rest of the family, with auto text notification stepping in.

“My mother recently fell and had to call 911. Thanks to auto text notification, my brother, my wife and I were notified and were able to get there before the ambulance did!”

Nothing is worse than finding out about a family emergency hours or days after the fact. After all, your aging family members may not be able to advocate for themselves effectively regarding health care. By receiving an automatic notification about 911 calls, you will have the chance to be there to offer caregiver support.

Eliminate the need for your family members to memorize new phone numbers.

Whether your aging parents have a good memory or not, nobody likes to memorize new phone numbers. Ooma Telo helps solve this problem. One Ooma customer recently shared how this helped their parents keep in touch with them:

“My parents have known my home number for years. For them to remember a new cell number just does not happen when you are in your 80’s. With Ooma my home number follows with my cell phone. No matter if I am home or away, I am there for my parents.”

Get health care for family members faster with Ooma Telo.

According to the CDC, three million older adults are treated for fall injuries each year in the United States. When those falls occur, it is critical to get assistance quickly. What if your family member falls in the middle of the night when getting out of bed to use the restroom and the phone is on the other side of the room? They might not get the immediate health care support they need.

The challenge can become even scarier for nursing home residents. Unfortunately, the staff in nursing homes and assisted living facilities are sometimes overworked and may not notice if your parents have taken a fall. Fortunately, Ooma Telo can play a role in relieving the pain of fall injuries.

With hands-free calling, you can make a hands-free phone call through Telo with a voice command via Telo’s integration with Amazon Alexa. That means your aging parents or family members can make a call to get help even if the phone is not close by. That means faster support for your family members when they need it.

Staying connected with family, no matter what.

Many of our customers have written to us to share their experiences staying in touch with family members using Ooma Telo. According to one elderly Ooma customer, Ooma Telo played an essential role during a storm. 

The customer wrote:

“During a recent storm the phone lines were all down, but not my Ooma Telo I was able to call for lifesaving help. Thank You Ooma”

Storms aren’t the only cause of losing touch. Some digital devices rely on Wi-Fi® internet access to keep you connected. If available, Wi-Fi is a great option. However, the assisted living facility where your parents live may not have Wi-Fi. In that case, use Ooma 4G, which keeps you connected without Wi-Fi, even if there is a major storm! Ooma 4G means you don’t have to worry about an internet failure or a power failure. Ooma 4G leverages the same networks used by major cellular phone services. It’s a way to get peace of mind to stay in touch with family even when you lose power. This is a great choice if you have an elderly parent living in a place where they do not have internet access but still need to stay in touch.

One way to save time when caring for aging parents with the Ooma Telo.

Caring for aging parents takes an emotional toll even if you have support from a nursing home. According to the Caregiver Action Network, “More than 1 in 10 (11%) family caregivers report that caregiving has caused their physical health to deteriorate.” There are many reasons for this suffering, depending on your situation. The stress of being always on call just in case your family member suffers a health problem is one possible cause for caregiver health strain.

Get peace of mind that you will not miss emergency calls. By using Ooma Telo, your family members will have more options to get in touch if they need help. Sometimes traditional phone calls are not available in a storm or in the event of a fall. Those are just some of the situations where an Ooma Telo call can make all the difference to your family.

How to find out if Ooma Telo is right for your family.

When you use Ooma Telo, you get caller ID, affordable calling and voicemail. You also get 911 call notification so you can quickly find out whether or not there are senior care problems. The best way to find out if Ooma Telo is right for you is to try it out for a month. Remember, you don’t need to worry about Wi-Fi in the nursing home because Ooma includes 4G wireless connectivity, so you can always stay connected.