“You can't underestimate the peace of mind that comes from knowing your mum has put the kettle on”: David's story
David from York, carer for his mother
My mum is 90 and she’s very independent. She's healthy, sharp, and looks after herself.
She used to live a few hours away, but when Covid came along it made more sense for her to be closer. It just felt like the right time to make the move which had been on the cards for a little while and luckily, we found somewhere nearby that worked well for her. I now see her two or three times a week, and we speak on the phone regularly.
But there came a point fairly recently where we started thinking it would be good to have a bit more of a safety net around her. Not because anything had gone wrong, but to make sure if anything did, she had the right support in place. We talked about it as a family and the general view was that we weren't at the stage where we needed formal care visits (and she didn’t want these either). We wanted to manage it ourselves for now, and keep that kind of support in reserve for if and when it's genuinely needed.
I spent a fair bit of time looking at what was out there online, and I even tried to put something together myself using off-the-shelf sensors. Unfortunately, I spent more time maintaining it than getting anything particularly useful from it.
That's when I came across Lilli. I had the opportunity to get access to an early version of the product and provide some feedback, which suited me well because I'm interested in tech. We got it set up at my mum's, and it's been running for a while now.
The thing I keep coming back to is how much reassurance it gives me in a very ordinary, low-key way. You can't underestimate the peace of mind that comes from knowing your mum has put the kettle on in the morning. It might sound small, but it really isn’t. It means she's up, she's moving around, she's going about her day. I can glance at my app and just see that she's going about her day at home, and that's enough to let me get on with my own day without that background worry.
There was one afternoon where I noticed she'd been out of the house for about three hours, which was a bit longer than the data suggested was normal. I gave her a call, and she was absolutely fine, just having a nice time with some friends. But the thing is, if something had happened, if she'd had a fall or got into difficulty somewhere, I'd have been on the front foot and had that nudge to check in rather than assuming everything was okay.
Lilli doesn't currently detect falls directly, it's not what the technology is designed for at this stage. What it does do is help you proactively notice when patterns are changing, whether that's movement around the home, time spent in certain rooms, eating habits. Those kinds of shifts can be quite meaningful, and often happen gradually enough that you might not pick up on them through the usual visits and phone calls alone. Having that layer of information feels useful without being intrusive.