While we’re all trying to stay connected, you know we’re stir-crazy when a parody of the title song from Broadway’s “Oklahoma!” (“Oh, Corona!”) gets almost 1.7 million views on YouTube.
It’s far worse for seniors. They can’t have their kids and grandkids visit them. There’s also the extra stress that comes with the nagging suspicion that they’ll remain on lockdown long after everyone goes back to work.
In fact, AARP has even come up with this dire comparison: Prolonged social isolation, for those aged 50 and older, “is the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”
Ways to Stay Connected?
Some of the niftiest technology offers solutions both to keep us connected and protect us against those taking advantage of the situation.
Health Alerts
If you are worried that all the anxiety is harming your loved ones’ overall well-being, the machine-learning algorithms that analyze activity data as part of Alarm.com’s Wellness solution can provide you with the very details you’ve suddenly found yourself obsessing about. Did they open their medicine cabinet when they should take their prescription? Have their sleeping, eating, and (yes) bathroom patterns changed? Are they up and about during the day?
All that and more is done by connecting their home to yours via smart-home technology. These real-time smartphone alerts let you know if something’s amiss. “You don’t even know it’s there, but it will protect you and let someone know if something does go wrong,” said Margarete Pullen of Dallas, Texas. Her son had the system installed by an authorized service provider for her and her husband along with a Wellcam video camera with two-way voice capability.
Movie Meet-Ups
Most of us are just trying to find novel ways to cope with the situation. Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist, and physician at Yale University states that this situation “calls on us to suppress our profoundly human and evolutionary hard-wired impulses for connection.”
Google’s new Netflix Party extension lets friends and family watch – and video chat their way through – a movie remotely. You’ll need a Netflix subscription, but then you’re free to debate whether all the hype about “The Irishman,” was justified.
Plus, unlike in real theatres, no one can complain if you’re making too much noise eating popcorn.
Apps!
No Netflix subscription? With apps like FaceTime, Skype, Houseparty, and Zoom comes more proof that social distancing needn’t mean social disconnecting. Mass virtual dinner parties. Mass virtual “happy hours.” Mass virtual gym classes (indoors and out). They’ve all become quite the rage. In fact, one Vermont couple in their eighties uses FaceTime to stay connected after the husband was put in a nursing home during the pandemic.
Virtual Security
Do you want to be a hero in your neighborhood? Use an app like Instagram to share a video of someone that Alarm.com’s doorbell cameras caught swiping one of the many, many packages you’ve been having delivered.
As we all try to stay connected during these trying times, remember to take care of your health. Contact USA Doctors Online to find a healthcare provider in your area today.
