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At Home Everyday Gear Nursing Home Wheelchairs

Levers to Drive a Manual Wheelchair — Update

My dad no longer walks more than a few steps with assistance (and not at all without it). As a result, he no longer gets even the minimal exercise he got when he could walk with assistance from his room to the dining hall in his nursing home. Now that his power wheelchair has been decommissioned, he’s also lost much of the freedom it gave him.

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At Home Good Stuff Kids

Cowbells in the Sick Room — and the Hospital

After I wrote about cowbells (suggesting using them in sick-rooms) a few days ago, I received an email from Elisabeth at Cowbell.com.

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At Home Games/Recreation Gifts Nursing Home

Jenga

When medicine and my dad first collided, it was a shock to him. His attitude toward his medical problems was, well, consumerist. He’d buy surgical services, and the surgeons would fix everything. End of story.

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At Home Everyday Gear Wheelchairs

Levers to Drive a Manual Wheelchair

Wijit Manual Wheelchair PropellerI haven’t seen this in person yet, so I’m throwing it out for the ‘may be worth investigating’ file. The Wijit is a set of geared handles attached to manual wheelchair wheels. The idea is to allow cleaner (literally) and more ergonomic propulsion of the chair — no more grabbing for wheel rims with the attendant stress on the back and shoulders.

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At Home Everyday Gear Games/Recreation Nursing Home

Simple Remote Controls for TV

Six Button Remote ControlSeveral years ago my in-laws needed a simple remote control for my husband’s grandmother. I told them about this one, which has just six buttons — the power button, a mute button, and the four critical ones: channel up, channel down, volume up and volume down. The large buttons, and the simplicity of the thing made it a logical choice. It runs about fifteen dollars. (Dynamic Living does note on their website that this remote won’t work with cable or satellite boxes, and that it may not work with newer TVs — information you may want for any remote you buy. It won’t matter much if you’re using an older, familiar TV, though.)

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At Home Home Modifications Wheelchairs

Collapsible Wheelchair Showers

Every now and then I see a product that just screams “DIY” — not at all, presumably, the response an entrepreneur is looking for. At a recent WCDExpo, one booth featured a wheelchair shower system. Cool, potentially, since it was meant to use an existing sink (probably in a kitchen), and could be collapsed and put away when not in use.

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At Home DIY Everyday Gear Home Modifications

Lever Door Handles

Round door knobs are a bane on the face of the earth. Face it, people, they’re just not user-friendly. Wet hands, mittens, gloves, an armful of groceries . . . everyday something makes turning that knob a pain, even if nothing else is going on with your arms or hands. Add arthritis, grasp impairment, carpal tunnel syndrome or whatever and whooeeee . . . standard doorknobs aren’t really very user-friendly.

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At Home Games/Recreation Gifts Good Stuff Kids Nursing Home

Engaging Hand-Held Game for One or More

Big Screen 20QOver the holidays, we bought a hand-held game called 20Q thinking that it might be entertaining for everyone if the family was visiting, and we couldn’t get out due to weather. The idea is simple — you think of an object — an apple, a bicycle, a brick — and the game asks you 20 questions in an attempt to figure out what it is. Using artificial intelligence technology, 20Q interprets your answers, guessing right a surprising amount of the time. (OK, almost all the time.) We were pretty cocky to begin with, but 20Q has a lot of personality, and didn’t mind humbling us one bit. The thing’s sassy — it taunts you as you play!

The beauty of it is that you don’t need any prior knowledge to play. You just need to know the names of objects, and to have the ability to answer relatively simple questions. The trickiest of the questions are along the lines of “is it a mammal?” In our experience, even if you don’t know an answer, though, the game goes on just fine.

Ours was the pocket version. Because it was so small and round, I thought my dad might have trouble holding it and using the buttons — and he did, a little. But he was too involved to mind much.

Naturally, we went out and picked up the big screen version so Dad could have it at the nursing home. It’s rectangular and easier to hold, and the buttons are also further apart and simpler to use.

When we first played the game with the family over the holidays, we read the questions out loud and answered them together. It was noisy and a lot of fun, with a lot of laughing. But even when my dad played the game by himself, 20Q seemed almost social — he’s interacting, not just reading the questions. And it’s addictive . . . the day we gave the big screen version to him, he hustled us on our way, and headed back to his room so he could play more! It’s gotten increasingly difficult to get him engaged with new things, so it was a treat to see how he took to this neat little toy.

The game is battery-powered and has several options for answers: yes, no, sometimes, rarely. There’s a backlight on the pocket version to make the text more readable. The big screen version doesn’t have the backlight, but the text is quite clear if you just change the angle when you’re holding it.

The text is surprisingly large — it scrolls, and you can slow it down or speed it up on either version. We were able to set the big screen version so that Dad had no trouble reading the questions, even though he’s not at all used to electronic games.

For the right nursing home or assisted living resident, this could be a fine independent activity. Anyone confined to bed or inactivity (however temporarily) could do worse than while away the boring hours tussling with this ‘intelligent’ little device. It could also be just the thing when conversation lags during hours spent in waiting rooms, or when hospital visits threaten to become stultifying.

Beware — it’s very competitive, and you’ll really need to stump it. Dad loves knowing that he might get the upper hand . . . next time! Even when you can’t win, it’s amazing and amusing to be awed by this clever little box.

Recommended for ages 8 and up. Available just about everywhere you find toys (except around Christmas time, when we couldn’t find it locally at all), and at Amazon.com (which sold out at Christmas). The pocket version is available in a slew of languages, but you may have to order online to get those.

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At Home DIY Everyday Gear

Non-Electric Call Bells

Hand-Held BellPosting about call buttons made me think about the low-tech system my dad used to call his caregivers on the west coast. He kept this bell on his night stand, and rang it when he needed help in the middle of the night. It worked well — at least it served to wake me up, so I could wake up the caregivers — but that’s another story.

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At Home Games/Recreation Kids

Video Game Therapy for Cerebral Palsy

An engineering student at the University of Toronto has designed a computer game for children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy. The purpose of the game is to get kids to engage the weaker side of their bodies. According to this article, kids use their stronger arm to hold a button under a chair, and then use the weaker one like a joystick to play the game.

The idea, of course, is to strength muscles and develop full potential, but a big plus is that this is therapy that can be done at home — and it’s meant to be entertaining. Motivation is everything in all kinds of therapy, and play-as-therapy is one good hook.

No reviews from kids yet . . . but the concept is very exciting. And strange — can’t you hear it now? “OK, kiddo, get that nose out of your book and over to that video console . . .”