Remote smart home management for elderly grandmother

RedXIV

Starting to look into a slightly messy scenario that I'd like to be able to help with. Might not be in the right forum but I think it's the most likely to have been experienced by folks here.

My grandmother, who would have been pretty savvy most of her life is now in a nursing home and likely in her twilight years. There's definitely been a decline in her ability to manage her devices and as a result my dad, who is still very savvy, has been tech support on call 24/7 to manage her room where she has a number of smart plugs, an alexa to control them, a TV with Sky & apps like netflix, an iPad, a kindle and an iPhone. She uses the Alexa to control the TV, the lamp in her room and her fan and she's a fairly avid reader on the kindle while using the iPad and iPhone pretty much exclusively for calls and online bridge from my current knowledge.

The problem is that the set up is a bit complicated and constantly getting disrupted, either by my grandmother herself inadvertently or the staff unplugging things to go in and hoover the room etc and the plugs no longer syncing with the alexa. My auld fella has tried printing out instructions for staff but they are not trained for it and it's not very fair to expect them to troubleshoot the setup he set up. But with the lockdowns preventing him from getting in to her and the fact it's an hour there and back to fix anything while he has his own medical issues, this is proving to be fairly frustrating.

What I'm hoping to do is set up something to try and take the workload off him a bit. I'm happy enough writing code without being an expert so what I'm thinking is something like a Raspberry Pi with a cron job that'll run a script every minute or so to perform a health check and if the health check fails, it'll run some troubleshooting and if possible, address the issues.

So to address the issue of things being plugged out, the raspberry pi needs to essentially have a boot script that ensures the cron is running, so that way if it is plugged out and then plugged back in, it'll automatically reconnect to the wifi, and set itself up again.

Then it should be able check that:

• The Alexa is on and connected to the wifi
• The smart plugs are configured and connected to the Alexa
• The iPad/iPhone are connected to the wifi also

Dream scenario would also have us be able to mirror whats on the iPad/iPhone/TV remotely so we can troubleshoot issues with these devices from home. Not expecting to be able to mirror the kindle even though that also gives us trouble and heartache :D

If anyone has done anything like this, I'd love to know a bit more about what they've used?

brav

I’m not sure if it’s the right approach and if you are just adding more complexity to the set up.

Is the issue the smart plugs used not connecting to Wi-Fi after restarting?

Maybe a better solution is more reliable smart plugs?

Personally I don’t actually use Alexa much, more HomeKit and home bridge, but never had plugs not connecting back after powering off and on. Even the Christmas tree one works after being in attic for months.

You would also have the hassle of if it’s possible to get a device not on same network to join network without physical access to the plug.

regarding the iPad, not much you can script to perform tasks on or from a local server, it has shortcuts and could script on device, but rejoining a Wi-Fi network is already built in.

niallb

Hi.

I've a bit of experience with remote support and also possess a 90 year old father with an iPhone/iPad and a few Echos/smart bulbs. He's an engineer so probably a bit better at problem solving than a lot of people his age, but it's interesting to see how differently he looks at devices.

My first suggestion would be to try and get all your grandmother's devices plugged in to one stripboard so they're only using one wall socket. Much easier to troubleshoot if only everything or nothing can be unplugged and less likely to be unplugged for cleaning.

Find out if the devices are connected to the nursing home WiFi. If so, you've limited control and visibility of them.

If at all possible get your own router in the room with the TV wired into it.

That isolates all your grandmother's stuff and makes it easier for you to assign permanent addresses to it and see if they're available. It also means you don't get remote access to other people's equipment in the nursing home, so might be easier to explain.

If you want to use a raspberry pi, try putting home assistant on it. You can use it to locate all your other devices and help send warnings and it'll automatically start up those kind of services.

Homeassistant has a huge amount of services and modules you can install Set up zerotier on it for example and you can connect your dad's or your own computer to your grandmother's LAN to see what's going on.