Baby monitor for bed bound elderly person?

K

kennedy

Guest
Hi,

Hoping someone can help. My elderly uncle is seriously ill and bed bound at the moment, he will not recover from the illness he has. His family desperately want to keep him at home and in time they will be provided with a hospice night nurse. Until then their biggest fear is that they won't hear him if he needs them during the night.

They have set up the base of a portable phone on his bed so that he can page them (ie when he presses the button they are paged on the phone) but he can get confused at night, partly because of his sleeping tablets, and does not remember to press the button.

They bought a Tomy baby monitor but it has proved to be useless because there is so much interference on it. They have followed the instructions and tried the monitor in several different sockets but there has been no improvement. It just seems like the combination of mobile phones, computers, broadband (?) etc in the house won't allow it to work properly.

Can anyone recommend a solution to this problem? Is there a monitor that can work well in a house despite the presence of computers, etc?

Is there any other kind of gadget they can use that will allow one of them 'hook up' to my uncle's room at night so that they can hear him loudly and clearly?

Would really appreciate any suggestions, thank you.
 
Hi
Very sorry that this is happening. We were in the same position about 6 years ago (with my Mum). We successfully used a baby monitor, so I don't know why it doesn't work for your friend. Really we only needed it for during the night if she needed to call us. We always made sure that one of us stayed the night with her (we all lived outside the home at this stage), and then she could call us during the night. She would just call out (she wasn't aware of the monitor as such) and obviously we would hear her over the monitor. Also, before trying the monitor, we had put a phone on the wall beside her bed (downstairs), and dialled one of the family (who would be "on duty" that night), and so that family member left the phone off the hook (on speaker), and my Mum's one was on speaker, and she could shout out and be heard. HOWEVER, that wasn't very successful because the person "on call" wouldn't hear a thing unless they were awake and taking notice ... which wasn't always the case. This was something that we tried before my Mum became very very bad, and while she was still living alone, but in the final analysis the baby monitor was the way to go and worked very successfully for us. I'm sorry I can't be more helpful.
 
Hi, in relation to the baby monitor; try it on it's batteries only without using the power sockets and gauge it's performance. I remember our own used to humm more when using mains power, so we just used mains power to charge batteries.
In the meantime I will browse and see if I can come up with a suggestion.
 
In the meantime, can you try the montior on with mobiles, conputer,modem turned off and see if it works?
If not, bring it back to the shop.
But if you find out what is causing the hum in the monitor maybe it would be an option of leaving that off at night?
 
Dont know if your monitor is a digital one. These usually have a selection of channels which you can play around with to find the best one. Have a digital one for our baby - has only 2 channels but it tends to only work properly on only one of them.
Check out one with more channels maybe?

Best of luck
 
Try the BT range. they are very good and provide the ability for you to talk through the monitor your uncle if need be
 
Thank you so much everyone for your help and suggestions, I really appreciate it. The suggestion to dial from one phone to another and leave the 'call' on speaker was a brilliant help while we tried to get a better monitor. We finally found one that works perfectly, a 'Tomy Walkabout Baby', and it has provided huge peace of mind. I suspect it works better because it doesn't plug directly in to the socket, the plug has a lead that goes in to the monitor so maybe that's why there is less interference?? I'm not sure if it's a digital monitor, but it's perfect. Thank you all again, you're great.
 
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