As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Many of us have parents who are hitting
that age where we need to kind of chip in help out and really start to take
care of them in a couple of different ways and smart home technology can be a
real benefit to us here as well as for our parents hello Automators thanks for tuning in
again I'm going to give you a full design so you don't have to go out and
think about this too much you can go ahead and add some little things as you
see fit for your parents or for anyone that you need to take care of that's
kind of getting up there in years maybe struggling a little bit taking care of
themselves now the first thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is
the idea that they have to manage all of this remotely and they're going to need
ways to log in remotely and you know I've heard this a number of times on the
channel and quite frankly I'm going to give you solutions today that do not
require that I'm going to start with safety because they think that's front
of mind for people whenever we talk about taking care of our family our
parents whomever I think that's the first and foremost thing so we're gonna
talk about devices that can create safety or ensure safety and we're going
to start with smart home cameras now there's a number of different ones on
the market that you can go ahead and log into remotely but I'll give you a few
examples: Arlo, Nest and the Wyze Cam rate here and I think the Wyze Cam is
kind of the right level for what we're talking about the Wyze Cam also has a
specific local recording feature that I think is very important for us here now
the cloud recordings are very positive you're getting a 12 second recording
anytime you trigger your Wyze Cam and you can trigger your Wyze Cam on motion
or sound detection those things can always be utilized as per normal but you
can also create custom triggers with if this than that and any of the other
smart home devices you have in your home or at least any of the ones I'm going to
recommend today you can create custom triggers that trigger a cloud recording
the other thing that I'll tell you is really nice with a Wyze Cam is the
ability to trigger on a zone so you can actually
zones inside the cameras view and inside the cameras application that will be
your only source for trigger so if you want to ignore other parts of the
location that these cameras are in you can do that so if you wanted to set this
specifically towards say something like the oven you could utilize a camera
specifically for the oven cause a trigger there to start the recording
something I use all the time here and something that I think is really well
suited to this application is Samsung smartthings and there's a number of
reasons for that but we'll start with the sensors this is
a button rate here you have motion sensors that you can go ahead and
utilize there's multi-purpose sensors there's leak sensors and there's many
more from other manufacturers that will directly connect with smart things
what's amazing about all of the different sensors from samsung here and
even this button is they all have a temperature sensor on them and that
means you can set triggers you can set alarms you can create automation off of
a temperature sensor and so when you think about things like ovens or things
like refrigerators or it's just the general temperature inside of a
apartment or wherever they're living well you can go ahead and create
triggers to make sure that temperature ranges are within kind of acceptable
limits you can also do a little test with having them turn on the oven or
having the oven turn on and then watching the temperature around a sensor
like this and then just taping or using the 3m sticky tape that they give you to
stick that temperature sensor right next to a device like that obviously you can
use it on a fridge as well but we're not really talking about safety anymore with
that so getting back to safety what you can also do is utilize things like
motion sensors and the multi-purpose sensors to actually know where they are
throughout the apartment and kind of track whether or not they're moving so a
great example of this is them actually getting out of bed in the morning does a
motion sensor pick up does the door stay open or closed all night
is there a change in any of those things and you can set automation again within
the application to do this and this is where you'll start to see the system's
come together or the different components come together you can utilize
these as triggers for your why's camps through if this then that you can also
be notified anytime that is happening as well the other thing that's really great
about smart things and connecting some of the bulbs and I'm going to tell you a
couple of examples of bulbs here that will connect with smart things but also
be accessible remotely the great thing about these is you can utilize reminders
or creep reminders for medications and things like that so you can leave a
little note next to a light bulb just in a similar thing to this and if this
turns on you can say that well the medication your medication hasn't been
taken yet you need to go and take that now would that bulb turn off well you
can set some rules around that and say a multi-purpose sensor around the cabinet
that they have to go to for their medications and you can trigger a Wyze Cam to actually watch that that is going on so you could have complete knowledge
of whether or not they took their medication and trigger a recording as
well to actually see that that has happened one other thing that's
interesting about lots of these sensors are at least the multi-purpose sensor
now I'm showing a motion sensor here but it has an accelerometer on it and it is
able to sense motion and vibration as well so you can utilize just the bigger
piece of those multi-purpose sensors to actually know whether or not something
is on the move whether or not there is vibration going on on a number of
devices so you could know if they're doing laundry if they have laundry and
wherever they're staying you could know a number of things and if you stick them
on something like a tap if it's very if you feel a lot of vibration in it you're
going to know if they're running that tap as well so there's a lot of options
with that little vibration sensor and this is where you'll want to be creative
within your own situation but you can do that smart
things is also a complete do-it-yourself smart home alarm system and so you could
actually arm that system whenever they go to bed and you would know whether or
not their door was open you can put sensors on the doors you can put locks
on the doors as well that will only open and close at certain times or that you
could open and close remotely as well and that's a very important thing I
think for a lot of safety related incidents that we can see now let's move
on to a few things around convenience and some of these things you could still
apply to safety in different scenarios but this little button here is it's
quite the thing to be honest and you can single tap you could double tap and you
can hold and those three functions allow you to do different things
now this little button could be placed basically anywhere in your home and if
there's certain switches or certain devices that they can't reach to well
you can utilize this and replace either the component with another smart home so
if it's a light switch you could replace it with another
ZigBee light switch or a z-wave light switch and have it connect to Samsung
smartthings I'm going to give you another solution for not replacing those
as well here in a moment but this allows you to give them control in different
locations say next to their favorite chair or their neck for their favorite
place and give them just little abilities and I would say you probably
just use the single tap option with these kinds of buttons and and you know
I know my parents don't love real complex things with automation so they
love just a button to press that turns on the lights for them so now before we
move on from that and I'll talk about this product right here but Samsung
smartthings what's great about that application and
the whole system is you can have multiple hubs under the same account and
you do not have to be local to manage the system so you can go ahead and
switch between hubs on the same account so you can have home and Grandpa's home
or BOMs home or whomever and you can go ahead and manage those on the same
application with the same account and you don't have to change anything except
the hub that you're communicating with so that is extremely powerful for us as
people who are going to be remote in a lot of cases speaking of remote here's
another device that is totally capable of you operating remotely you do not
need to be on the local Wi-Fi network for this as well this is called switch
bought and these are the two different components here to switch by this is the
hub plus so this is the version they sell today and this is a switch bot
itself now the hub plus is an IR controller so it's a lot like a harmony
hub and it does have a lot of devices on there so you can go ahead and connect or
control any IR based device or a lot of IR based devices I had a few that didn't
quite work out but in general you will be able to find a device that is
controllable by this switch bought hub here now what I'll also tell you about
this hub is it bluetooth connects to the switch bots and it's like an auto
pairing thing it's fantastic actually so what happens with these little switch
bots is there a little actuated so they actually come out of the device and they
tap the switch so you could set these on any device that has a push button so you
don't actually need to change their devices you don't actually need to
change their light switches you can simply stick these on with the 3m tape
that they provide and then you can have this actuate whenever you like you can
set it up through if this than that you can connect it to the different voice
assistance if you have that in your home as well or in the home as well so this
is a highly highly powerful product both for convenience and also for not making
them get up and do things you can also control it remotely so you can press
this button as long as this is on the Wi-Fi you can press this button from
anywhere in the world as long as you have a cellphone connection so that
actually gives you a little bit of a safety backing for these products highly
highly impressive and of course you can control air
conditioners and fireplaces and all those kinds of things that are IR based
so finally let's talk about the voice assistance and this is a bit of an
interesting discussion because normally I would tell you well the Google Home is
the better product and the Google Assistant does a little bit better but
here I'm going to tell you that Amazon has a very clear edge in this regard and
the reason is I can again remotely control amazon's echo series of products
without being on the same Wi-Fi I can attach it to my same account set it up
for them or I can create them their own account now if you wanted to get local
for any reason you can also remote into a PC or a laptop that's sitting on the
network and go to their actual website which I'll just leave a link down below
here and on screen right now but you can go to that website login and then you'll
be able to remotely manage those devices as well that way and then you'd be on
the local network as well so Amazon as soon as you can log into the Amazon
application for their voice assistant here you're able to control any light
bulb or device that is connected to this through the Wi-Fi so as soon as you
connect any bulb it doesn't matter what kind – Amazon's voice assistant you're
able to control it remotely without being on the Wi-Fi and that would
obviously be very powerful their routines is very powerful as well now
the other side of voice assistants are a little bit of the convenience factor
clearly these it's good things it's good to keep people engaged with society and
thinking about the outside world because it can I think sometimes get pretty
lonely so they can get the news and you can set that up for them which new
sources they want to hear every morning they can get the weather they can get
directions they can get all kinds of things that they might want to have
access to in just a quick moment just by saying something like
good morning now I want to talk about a couple more systems that you can utilize
and manage remotely and this might trigger you into looking at a few
different products you know the lock the door lock if you can actually make that
change well that's great you can go ahead and attach one that attaches to
Samsung smartthings the other thing you could look at if
you're a heavy iOS user is home kit because home kit can be managed remotely
you don't have to be connected to that Wi-Fi network
in order to actually manage those devices especially with things like
philips hue which again that application can be managed anywhere in the world as
long as you've enabled that setting there in the device so there's a couple
more capabilities for you there a couple more things you could do if you need
more information you're seeing a couple of links here on screen that give you
access to Samsung smartthings and our Amazon voice assistance I think
those are critical components to this so thanks for watching everyone and we will
see you next time