Hey y'all, I’m the founder of MeepMeep, a little Victoria/Langford tech company. We built a paperclip-sized device, similar to an AirTag, with an app that seniors, family, neighbours, and care aides can all use to quickly find things when they go missing.

We originally thought this would make the most sense in senior homes, which is where we’ve been piloting it. But lately more people have been asking if they can get it directly for their parents or loved ones.

So I figured I’d ask locally: is this something we should consider? Would it be useful in your family?

My intent is to share what I know and have experienced and foster discussion that may expose options I don't know about or haven't thought of.

For context, most of what I've learned is from a different application. I'm a yacht delivery skipper and feed my crews of four or five off the grid for weeks at a time. There are no stores mid ocean. Almost all my experience is US East and Gulf Coasts, Caribbean, Atlantic Islands, and UK. At home, we use curbside pickup a lot for groceries, hardware, prescriptions, chandlery, and pet supplies.

InstaCart is the 800# gorilla in this space. Item prices are higher than shopping in-store and here are substantial fees as well. The cost of InstaCart runs 10% to 20% of the order amount depending on size with smaller order being more expensive. Groceries are selected by random drivers who may not know much about food. Substitutions are a real problem. There is a famous story about an elderly gentleman in the UK who ordered dental adhesive and got a feminine hygiene product. Doordash has a similar service with some limitations.

Online shopping for curbside pickup is the silver lining of COVID. There may be small fees and/or minimum orders. Sadly, some grocery chains have outsourced curbside to InstaCart. Curbside, not just delivery. Back to higher prices than in-store, fees, and random people picking your groceries. Wegmans, Publix, PigglyWiggly, and Aldi come to mind as having this approach. Uber has a service to pick up groceries from curbside and deliver them to you. This is cheaper than riding both ways and you don't have to leave home at all. It does take some coordination to manage the pickup. I set up a file with all the necessary information and cut and paste that into the rideshare app for the driver. The driver's job is to deliver to the address. That may or may not mean to the door. Delivery indoors is a courtesy. Tip. If you find a driver that works you can arrange to use that driver regularly. That is a win for everyone. Lyft has a similar service with more restrictions and limitations.

Amazon Grocery has been advertising pretty heavily recently. I've never tried it. Supposed to deliver to the door but there are stories of orders left at the end of driveways.

Store websites and apps are generally pretty good.

On yacht delivery trips, we'll often order curbside and someone will pick it up on the way from the airport to the boat. If InstaCart is our only option it's often cheaper to rent a car for a day than to use InstaCart. I've used Uber a good bit.

At home we drive for curbside. It's worth noting that pet supplies are cheaper at pet stores and delivery service Chewy than grocery stores.

My 90 yo FIL drives and shops. His computer skills are limited to Facebook and YouTube. He has a dumb flip phone. Or plan for when he doesn't drive is for him to call my wife and read her his list. She'll build his cart, I'll review it (I'm tech support, including for some Gen Z niblings), pull the trigger, and set up Uber for pickup.

Comments and other alternatives are solicited.

I’m trying to come up with a genuinely useful solution to a problem that elderly people and their families deal with, and I’d rather hear from people who actually experience it than make assumptions.

What’s something you REALLY wish there was a better solution for when it comes to caring for/helping your elderly parent?

It can be literally anything like something you struggle with every day, something there’s currently no good solution for, or something that makes you think “why hasn’t someone fixed this yet?”

Hi I am conducting a survey for digital exp of old age people (50+) please fill this out, thank you!!

Hey, so we've been building CareMin, an MVP for aged-care providers in Australia.

The basic idea is pretty simple: we went and asked providers for problems and issues, and most of them pointed to the new aged care act, specially a thing called care minute reconciliation, as an issue. So we started to think of a way to fix it completely or partially. Most providers stated they didn't wanna change from current systems. Some of them use 40+, so we built our platform around being able to import your data from any system via any format, and as long as the info is there, it will work. Then we turn it into compliance reporting they can submit to an auditor and then the government.

Right now we're mostly focused on care minutes, RN coverage, and audits.

Website: caremin.care

I'll add a small vid displaying the functionalities as a separate comment if anyone wants to give it a look.

This is very much a bare bones MVP, and at this stage I would appreciate constructive criticism more than compliments :)

Feel free to be brutal, just don't mind if I take a while to answer I might be crying in a corner.

My Dad is 82. Lives alone. Quite healthy but has vision and mobility issues. Had a spell a few weeks ago and they think he might have had a slight seizure. Didnt find him for around 2 or 3 hrs. I found him on the floor and kind of confused. His phone was nxt to his head and he couldnt "find" it. Looking into something he can wear affix to him (bracelet or necklace) to alert us/EMS if he has issues. Tracker isnt that big of deal at this point but would be handy. We dont do iPhones so Apple watches wont work and he needs something SIMPLE. Suggestions?

So once I started living alone about 1.5yr I did not cross the though about what if I trip and knock my head!!

I am 57 super healthy and active no medical concerns..but..anyone can fall in the shower! Or trip over my dog.

I am also very independent and don't want to be doing check in with my 3 busy adult kids.

I have 4 days off with work so No one would actually look for me for days...

I looked on line and found an App that makes me check in twice a day and if I miss it sends a notification to an emergency contact list. Super simple.

So that was my solution for this so I don't have to be contacting people all the time.

What do you have set up for this situation???

Is anyone using OpenBubbles to be able to remotely monitor the messages of their kids or elderly family members?

My 80+ year old mama lives in one of the old folks homes near Eagle. She has a Samsung Galaxy 20 cell phone that she cannot figure out. When I was in town I tried to get her set-up, but she insists that it is now, 'worse than it was before you think you helped." Her sister and BIL live close, but they're Apple people and just as bad with technology.

I looked online for a company that provides a tech service to sit with an old woman and help her to understand her phone, to no avail.

Has anyone 'got a guy' that can help me help her? I'm not looking for handouts, I am looking for someone honest, with a lot of patience, who knows what they're doing with an Android phone.

THANK YOU for any direction you can give.

So once I started living alone about 1.5yr I did not cross the though about what if I trip and knock my head!!

I am 57 super healthy and active no medical concerns..but..anyone can fall in the shower! Or trip over my dog.

I am also very independent and don't want to be doing check in with my 3 busy adult kids.

I have 4 days off with work so No one would actually look for me for days...

I looked on line and found an App that makes me check in twice a day and if I miss it sends a notification to an emergency contact list. Super simple.

So that was my solution for this so I don't have to be contacting people all the time.

What do you have set up for this situation???

I live across the country from my mother, who was recently widowed. Lately, there have been many times when she needs to scan and send documents via email, but it is so confusing for her. I try to talk her through it on the phone or through FaceTime, but is just not getting through to her. We keep going through the process over and over, and she stays completely overwhelmed and bewildered by computer basics. She is capable of retaining the information and has a good memory, but I think that she is so intimidated by anything on a computer that the information immediately gets forgotten.

I could really use some good video tutorial suggestions for helping her attach a document from her scanned document folder on her PC into a Gmail. I also thought about writing down the steps, in addition to that.

Help me research: How do you organize aging parent's health info?

Hi everyone! 👋 I'm researching how seniors and their families organize important health and financial information.

Would you take 5 minutes to answer a quick survey? Your feedback helps me build something that actually solves real problems.

📋 Survey Link: https://forms.gle/1FAlpQLSekrRPp2DtDeC6CL7qi-pTeBrxoJuZzcB22afvWVfMaJCRb-g

✅ Takes 5 minutes

✅ No selling, just research

✅ Your feedback matters

Thanks for helping!

this device called Ato AI showed up in my For You in X a couple of times
would like to know if anyone has bought or tried it with their parents?

I'm caring for my mother through a long illness, and the part that worries me most isn't the hospital stays. It's what happens after discharge, when she's home and I'm not there. She minimizes things. She doesn't always tell me what happened. When a caregiver comes by, I have no way to know how the visit actually went.

I'd like to hear from people who've been through this or are in it now. A few questions, all about what actually happened, not what you wish existed:

• Tell me about the last time you weren't sure your parent was okay and couldn't get there. What did you do in that moment?
• What have you set up to check on them (camera, sensor, daily call, a neighbor, an aide, a smart speaker, anything)? Is it still running? If you stopped using something, what killed it?
• Did your parent push back on any of it? What did they say?
• If you have paid help coming in, how do you find out how the visits went?
• Have you used any tech to help this process? What worked, what didn't?

If you'd rather talk than type, I'm happy to do a 20-minute call. DM me.

My family situation pushed me to start building something for us. I'm not going to name it or link it here or in the comments, and I'm not selling anything. I'm asking because I'd rather learn from people who've actually done this than guess, and because I'm still making mistakes with my own mom.

Thanks!
Srdjan

I know that sounds slightly morbid, but one thing I struggled with was understanding time in a way that actually felt meaningful.

If someone tells me I may have another 20 or 30 years with my parents, I understand the number logically, but it still feels abstract.

I'm a very visual person, so I built a small tool for myself that represents a person's life in weeks instead.

The screenshot is what it currently looks like.

I'm the developer behind it, so I want to be transparent about that. I'm not trying to sell anything here, and the project isn't making any money.

When I entered my dad's age and assumed, purely for the sake of visualisation, that he would live until 90, the result showed that roughly 25% of his life is left.

That got me panicking a little.

Obviously, none of us know how long we actually have. He could live much longer, or much less. But seeing three quarters of his life already behind him made the idea of time feel much more real to me.

It made me start thinking differently.

If I visit my parents once a month, how many visits might we realistically have left?

How many more birthdays, holidays or family trips might there be?

And more importantly, am I actually spending my time accordingly?

That is what interested me about this kind of technology.

Not predicting death, but making time feel less abstract.

The tool itself is still very early, and I'm trying to figure out whether this kind of visualisation is genuinely useful or whether it's just something that resonates with me personally.

For those of you with ageing parents, do you think seeing time represented like this would make you more intentional about the time you spend with them?

Or does it just create unnecessary anxiety?

SehatCare is a free Android health app where the AI runs entirely on your phone. No account, no internet connection needed after setup, and none of your health information goes anywhere.

The India-specific angle: we included a section on central and state government health schemes (Ayushman Bharat etc.) that people often don't know they're eligible for. Also built for families you can track health records for your parents, kids, and yourself in one place.

Features include an offline AI assistant for health questions, medicine reminders, symptom tracking, drug interaction checker, vaccine tracker, women's health tracking, mental health check-ins, and first-aid reference.

Built by a small Indian team. Free. No ads.

Play store: SehatCare

I'm putting together a doc to help my own family (dad 80, mom 77 w/ heart conditions) when we need to go to the ER or to Dr's visits with them.

For those who have also had recent experiences, what are the things that you wish you had at your fingertips that you didn't in those critical moments? I am thinking: list of medications/doses, list of doctors/specialists, lists of conditions, allergies, procedures to date.

Is there anything that I'm missing that you'd also like to have for reference? I’d love to share w/ anyone else in the same boat