The Life Saver On Dad's Computer Screen

A daughter caring for her aging father finds help—and peace of mind—from a virtual companion named Pony

- Lauren Smiley

Arlyn Anderson grasped her father’s hand. “A nursing home would be safer, Dad,” she told him. “No way,” Jim Anderson interjected. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before. Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades earlier to be near her parents. Now, in 2013, she was fiftysomething and finding that her father’s decline was all-consuming.

Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and general Mr. Fix-It— started experiencing bouts of paranoia, a sign of Alzheimer’s, in his mid-eighties.

Arlyn’s house was a 40-minute drive from the cottage, and she had been relying on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs on her dad.She set an open laptop on the counter so she could chat with him on Skype. She installed a camera in his kitchen and another in his bedroom so she could check whether he had fallen. When she read about a new eldercare service called Care.coach a few weeks after broaching the subject of a nursing home, it piqued her interest. For about $200 a month, a computerized avatar (controlled remotely by a human caregiver) would watch over a homebound person 24 hours a day; Arlyn paid that much for just nine hours of in-home help. She signed up immediately.

A Google tablet arrived a week later. Following the instructions, Arlyn uploaded dozens of pictures to the service’s online portal, including images of family members and Jim’s boat. Then, she and her sister Layney Anderson presented the tablet to Jim. “Here, Dad. We got you this.”

An animated German shepherd appeared and started to talk in the same female voice you hear when using Google Maps or other Google apps. Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold, Jim would have wanted to know exactly how the service worked. Now he simply chatted back.