thank you so much for making time to join the share and learn rather than enjoy the sunshine that i can see in all of your backgrounds um my name's erin dryden as ellie said i'm director of carer support here at carers uk and i'm new to the organization so this is actually my first share and learn um and i'm really pleased to uh to join you all today um my uh caring has been a part of my life since a very early age um i was a carer for a parent from about the age of three onwards in different capacities obviously there was wasn't much i could do at that age but i had some support responsibilities um that have come and gone throughout my life and so it's always been a part of my life and i've worked for the last 20 something years in the disability sector and with um care support and carers and disabled people and in those dynamics so again karen's been a thread professionally as well as personally for me so um i was i was really pleased to be asked to um to help out and put together some um pointers around everyday technology that can help and today's emphasis is on the sorts of things that are available mainstream online on your phones or little gadgets that can make life easier um whether be it for yourself um in your day-to-day life for your careful person um or to actually help you in your caring roles so um the four areas i'm going to focus on today are an introduction to some websites that have useful information on them looking at comparison sites that you can use to help with your bills and to find the cheapest possible options for your the best possible options for you smartphone features and apps so how you can use your phone maybe a bit differently and then you usually do and a little bit on connected devices so this is sort of um things like home automation and um those sorts of devices that can connect to the internet into your phone to help make life a bit easier for you so you know run through those the first being websites for info so i'd be remiss if i didn't talk about the carers uk website which as you're online i guess a lot of you um will have access before but the areas we're in the process of renewing our website and we'll have a a completely new look coming very soon so you'll be able to find all the information that helps you a lot easier and there'll be more features on there to help but at the moment i just wanted to flag up the help and advice section here um which is where we've got all of our toolkits our videos our info sheets and fact sheets there we also have the forum which you can get to quickly using this link here the forum is a perk of membership if you're not already a member um you can see the forum if you're a non-member but you can actually post a reply and by joining carers uk for free and that's one of the big perks of membership that a lot of carers find really useful to get support from one another um and to share your experiences so um that's really useful and if you're new to caring which i don't know if any of you are um we have the upfront guide which is available where you put in a few details about yourself and your caring role and it gives you some tailored information that to help you navigate all the all the stuff that's out there so upfront is also a really good feature and that you can find by going through into help and advice which is this one here the nhs website is a very straightforward home page at the moment but has some really key information on it so and the big links here are the health a to z where you can put in something like condition symptoms things like that and find out more about it and then the medicines data said is a really good one if you are yourself or you're caring for somebody that has a lot of medicines and um you want to be able to read up more about them and you can find information on them here following this link obviously at the moment covid is uh still at the forefront of our thinking so the section on the covered resources um and what to do if you suspect that you may have covered or want to get tested is all down here at the top of in this bar up here though there are also some tips on living well so well-being tips and mental health and care and support which are really key sections of the website where you can find more the other websites that i would recommend everybody familiarize themselves with are the local authority websites for yourself and the cared for person if they're different to if it's different location than where you live those local authority websites that ending.gov dot uk will always have information on what social care is available for you what support is available for carers and the person that you're caring for as well as all the usual sort of public amenities and things like that so that's the sort of third website that i would recommend everybody familiarize themselves with the next sections on comparison site so this is all about shopping around to make sure that you're on the best possible tariffs for your bills and finding cheaper insurance um when you have to renew finding the best possible quotes and that sort of thing so again these are pretty much household names so um money supermarket is one of the big ones and um what i would say about money supermarket is that it is a private for-profit website so it does take advertisements and it does have paid for results um alongside the other ones that come up in your search so um that's just something to be aware of still very useful though and if we look at all of these here you've got broadband credit card energy which you're obviously interested in today car insurance home insurance travel insurance and pet insurance so um i have all of those at the moment except travel because i'm not going anywhere but my greyhound mr pickles i found her insurance using this site and um i'm very pleased to have it in case anything ever happens to her so you can compare you can run searches based on all of your information um that regarding energy if you have details of your current energy provider and your current energy usage you can get the best possible search results there but if you don't have that information you can still enter some stuff and it will give you the best possible quotes there the next one which i think we all know because of the meerkats is compare the market and again it has all of these sections to it down here that you can find again it's a for-profit website so there will be advertisements in the mix um but still very useful tool and in the past personally i've run searches on both to find the best possible deal and it's fairly quick and they will email you all of the results so that you can um go back and click through later if you don't want to do it there and then when you run the search if you want to take a bit more time to think about it but this one has for instance motorbikes van insurance and life insurance otherwise all the same ones as before look after my bills is another comparison site which is really really helpful and this has an additional feature as it says here you may have seen it on dragon's den look after my bills is the one that i currently use um because when you put your details in there it finds the best deal for you and then unlike the other ones it will automatically do the same thing when your deal runs out so a year later it will actually um look at what you've used in terms of your energy and then find a the best possible provider for you so um actually it was last month it did that process for me and it emailed to say who it had found i happened to be staying with the same provider um and um it told me ahead of the switch and when the switch had successfully happened so if you want to be hands off and just let the site do the work for you this is a really good option and finally another household name for a different reason citizen's advice now their energy comparison site is different from the other ones it's not for profit um so it compares the widest pool of energy suppliers it's only for your gas and electricity it doesn't do pet insurance and travel insurance and all those other types like the other websites but you put in your postcode you can then add some more details about the tariffs that you're on and in your energy usage and it will give you all of those results and again no adverts and no paid for results in there but only useful for energy purposes so that's a little tour of some websites and now i'm going to talk about smartphone features and apps my first caveat of this is that i use an iphone and um some of the features and apps will be different on android phones or other other providers but all the features that i run through are available on android they'll just look a bit different and we'll have links to guides to set up all of them in the email that elie's going to send out to you as well so if you're an android user you'll get the gist of it but it will look a bit different in practice so the first thing again i'd be remiss if i didn't plug was the jointly app this is actually carers uk's only app it costs 299 and then you have it for as long as you want to use it and jointly is a great tool because it's useful if for yourself if you're the only carer for your cared for person because it helps you put all of the information about them in one place so you've got you can just about see around this person's thumb you've got the calendar so upcoming appointments and past appointments if you need to remember when they took place you can take notes you can add tasks to remind you to do things um you can put all of the contacts medications and devices um that you use on there so again that's all in one place but a lot of people aren't the only carer and like one scenario that happens a lot is siblings caring for a parent and sharing that care between them and if they both have jointly it means that they can communicate with one another plan together and always be on the same page so you're not there are no surprises or nobody's left out of the loop when it comes to the provision of care also if your cared for person has any home care agencies coming in a lot of agencies will also use jointly if you ask them to to use for communication and to again share all of those things and updates um and you know log things in there that are important again to keep everybody on the same page it's a really useful tool and a few local authorities provide jointly for free so if you are in contact with your um with your social worker and you may be in a position to get that for free if not again it's only 2.99 so getting onto some phone features now so one thing that a lot of people don't think to do is to use their their camera in their phone as a magnifying glass so i'm zooming in on some fine print that i've got here to show you how that can work so if you go into your if you open up the camera app you can actually just pinch like this and this is the demonstration and it will zoom in as far as the camera will go which is in this case 3.1 times so you can take small prints and really blow it up in real time you can go you know you can use your phone to go from thing you know document to document in real time is while the camera's zoomed in and watch it on your screen the other way that can work though is to actually take a photo so if you take a photo of something with small print on it in focus you can then open up the photo that you've taken any time afterwards and again use the pinch feature to zoom in and most of the newer phones have really great cameras so they'll capture all of the small print in the photo for later viewing so that's something that you can use for taking photos of the medications um or the leaflets that come with medication which are in tiny print always just you know to fit in the boxes um that's a really useful way of of using your phone scanning documents is something that a lot of not a lot of people think of they think maybe they can take a photo or if you've got a scanner or you can go somewhere and photocopy things and scan them in but you can actually use um your phone to scan into a pdf this is really useful for people that are caring because there's so much documentation associated with looking after somebody or somebody seeing various doctors and specialists and things like that i for one as soon as i get something that comes in in paper i use this feature to scan it in so i've always got a pdf to refer back to later so i find it really useful so in an iphone you launch the notes app which is free it comes with your phone and you there's a new note here so you go down to the camera thing and choose scan documents and you can see here it's finding a document in an otherwise this is just on my coffee table it finds a document it takes a picture you can turn the pages and it will keep taking pictures for you and then here you have a pdf a scan and you saw it was laying down at an angle on on the table but it's made it rectangular and you know framed it perfectly trimmed off all of the the outs that you know the excess um that was on the outside so that's now a good scan that you can send or keep for your own use so again quite a useful and free tool that you can use there reader mode is something that i find really useful if i'm using my phone to do some research or do some reading and i'm going i'm using websites that have a lot of adverts or a lot of things on them that are a distraction from actually just sitting down and getting through the reading more like it was a book so this is on an iphone again and i'm just using the standard safari browser that comes with the iphone and just show you how this website looks before and after reader mode so you can compare the two so this is looking up on drugs.com gabapentin and anti-convulsant um scrolling through you can see all of these adverts and things like that that come up so it's just not as easy on the eye really as it could be so the alternative is to click up here and select reader mode and now if you go through it's just plain text it's all the same format but you can even change the colorway to make it as easy on the eyes as possible for whatever works for you and i understand the beige option that just showed is better for people that have dyslexia um it makes it easier for dyslexic people to to read information so reader made something that again it's a bit hidden a lot of people don't realize what these little a's at the top of the screen mean but um it enables you to absorb information a bit more comfortably i'd like to think medical id is a great feature again it doesn't get a lot of fanfare so a lot of people don't know about it it enables you to store vital information um about yourself um and or and you can if your cared for person carries a phone about them too so in the event of an emergency um emergency services can take your phone out and they don't need to unlock it or anything like that but they can access this information that you load onto it so i'm just going to take you through that process so you go on an iphone into settings and then you choose health and then medical id you put the information that you want to be in there so i've blanked out my date of birth i should have blanked out how old i am as well but i didn't get that far so it shows that i'm a 41 year old person i'm 68 kilos 6 1 and my brother daniel is my emergency contact and it has his number in there so again in the event of an emergency they can take this phone out of your pocket or your bag and go into this and call your emergency contact and let them know that there's that um they need to come and find you or provide some help or information this isn't all the information that can go on there you can have um information about any medication um that's currently being taken can go on there as well and any health conditions as well can be listed there so again as you know you can put as much or as little on there as you want you can just put you don't even need to put your weight in height you can just have the emergency contact is used there but again a really useful thing so the next this just shows you what it would look like so the lock screen on the phone you select emergency at the bottom and then this is where you can dial 999 if you want but the medical id icon shows up there and they would see it like this so it's different to the other view but has the same information on it so really useful i recommend everybody set it up because you never know now we're going to talk a little bit about connected devices so those um you may have heard of home automation um and devices that could be really useful for people to use just to make life a bit easier these can look like smart plugs which may look like this sorry obviously my dog's about to join me and maybe make some noise uh while i'm for his end zone luckily she's well insured as i just said all right okay come and go um smart bowls which sometimes look a bit like this and you can control individually [Music] and smart blinds and smart blinds can either be something like this which is little motor that moves the cable on the blinds or it can be built into the blinds itself so ikea sells some connected blinds which are quite reasonably priced if you're thinking about replacing your window dressings and that has a motor in the actual roller at the top of the window that you can control so the benefits of this so you can control it from a different room so i'm really lazy um so i have a smart plug in my bedroom for my electric blanket because i also hate to be cold and i can just using siri um ask her to switch on my electric blanket 15 minutes before i go to bed and i have a nice toasty bed to get into um but you can also control things remotely which means if you live somewhere different you can control devices in a completely different home just by using being connected to the internet so if you want to have some control over lights blinds anything plugged into a socket remotely for the cared for person that can be something that just helps you to make sure and you can look on your phone and see what's switched on and what isn't at any one time just so you can be sure of the environmental controls so if it's getting warm you can switch your fan on remotely if it's connected to a plug connected plug um you might want to do the same for lighting you might want to do the same for controls for blinds and things like that the other thing like i just mentioned is that there's voice controls so siri and alexa um can switch things on this can be really useful for some um some people that need care it might be less able to sort of bend down and switch on plugs and sockets and reach things um they can use siri or alexa instead to control devices if it's got one of those smart plugs what i would say is that all of these things are available on a range of different budgets so amazon have um smart plugs um that start from i think as little as something like seven pounds fifty um that work with alexa and with an app um up right up to ones which are fifty pounds which you know are all singing all dancing so there's something to suit most budgets available it's not just for um people that have lots of lots of uh money to spend smart heating controls are obviously really important and we're talking about smart meters today and this is another way in which you can control your energy usage so smart heating controls are mean that you can usually control something from your phone or you can have a display that you can operate them on the reasons that these are really useful so again first of all remote controls you can take over the environmental controls for somebody in a different household which might be beneficial to a lot of you um it also means that you can switch on or off the heating um remotely or from your phone before you get home you can switch the heating on so you're not having the heating on all day while you're away from the home for instance programming is a lot easier on a lot of smart heating controls because you can set up complex programs depending on what your lifestyle means so if you want to have the heating on at the beginning of the day and then off and then on again when you come home from work that's something that you can program a lot easier on your phone than you could on all of those little dials or little plastic slider things that you have to move on thermostats for instance and it just makes it a lot easier and it also means that you can program in either something that's the same for work weekdays and something different at weekends or you can have a different program for every day of the week if you like um depending on your what your lifestyle is what your pattern is where you are at any one time geofencing is um a word that just means finding your phone your heating controls knowing where your phone is so um with a lot of heating controls if you leave your home or your phone goes with you um you will get an alert to say you're no longer at home do you want to switch off your heating so that can be a real money saver and can help if you forget to switch off the heating yourself some smart heating controls so i'm thinking of the tardo one here particularly have a smart location feature for energy savings so not only does it know when you've left home it will automatically switch your heating off for you and it will track how far you are from home and make a decision about whether to switch off the heating altogether or just turn your thermostat down a bit so it can easily heat it up again when you return so this is a really useful one if you've got the sort of lifestyle where it doesn't fit into a sort of a set program for the day you know for the day how your home will be heated um it uses data about the weather it learns how much energy it takes to heat up your home and use as an algorithm to decide what to do based on where you are so if you go on holiday you don't need to think about anything it will just know that you're in another country and switch it off altogether as soon as you get back and connected the internet it will start to heat your home for you and if i take my dog for a walk around the block it will keep my home at the right temperature but as soon as we start to go a little bit further so i'm in east london so if i go to say the olympic park it will think okay i can turn the heating down a couple of degrees and when he starts heading back we'll switch it on again so a really useful one and that system pretty much pays for itself in the u over the course of one winter because of how it uses uses your location in that sort of smart way another one which is a carers uk connection is the pivotal pill dispenser now there's loads of connected pill dispensers out there and again to suit all budgets and all needs and but the pivotal one um is worth mentioning because it connects with the jointly app um so you saw um in that app display there's a devices menu at the bottom so the pivotal pill dispenser will actually connect and update information into the app so everyone can see what's happening there so um this takes 28 doses so that can be you know one pill a day for 28 days it could be four pills a day for um seven days any combination of those things and the notifications go in the jointly app so whether a pill's been whenever a pill has been dispensed or not dispensed on schedule you'll be notified if you use the joint the app and you can schedule it as needed so you know you might have pills that need to be taken at 9am lunchtime and eat in the evening you can schedule it to whatever you need and like i said it can dispense 28 doses so you can plan that accordingly home security and cameras so this is something that a lot of people um with caring responsibilities um like to use and set up which are some cameras to monitor the environment um to make sure that they can see um where they're cared for person is when they can't be there so there's loads of different cameras available they can connect with um siri and alexa if you use those things or you can use the app that comes with the cameras to to see what's happening you can also have window and door monitoring so a notification if a door is left open for instance using a device or sensor that fits on your door one on the door one on the door frame and when they move apart it can alert you if they remain apart for a fixed amount of time it can alert you again which can be really useful and again really not very expensive at all you can view the interior or exterior in real time to just monitor the safety if you're cared for person and something i think we've probably all seen is doorbell and cameras so they sort of ring cameras that um fit on doorbells and some sometimes they capture some really hilarious things happening on your doorstep but you know in the if you're in the position of um having a careful person that's not able to answer the door themselves um you can answer it on your phone on their behalf if they have a delivery you can say pop it and you know you can put that under the um the um under the doormat or around the garden door or fence or you know anything like that give them instructions you can speak to them in real time and see what they're doing as well so that's just some things that are out there just to give you a taster there's a lot more um available lots more solutions if you're interested to find things there's plenty available on amazon you can find um all sorts of stuff in their home automation category um and there's things like i say to suit all budgets but this just gives you an overview that there's actually quite a lot of features on your phone already that might benefit you there's quite a lot of features of online different sites that can help you saving money and energy and um yeah those devices are out there and do often make your your caring life a bit easier as well and thanks everybody for having me today and for joining the session particularly on this very warm afternoon my class is a little bit like a greenhouse right now um so i hope you're managing to stay a little bit cooler than i am and so my name is christina paniosu and i'm the partnerships marketing manager at the company and smart energy gb but i'm also very happy to share my own personal caring journey with you as well and so my mum was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. so i became a carer for her
during her um her cancer before she passed away alongside with my siblings um and i've also worked at a disability charity um not with aaron but um at disability charity too so um just wanted to share my experiences there and in terms of the company that i work for now so as i said it's called smartening ggb and you've probably not come across the name of us before but you might know what we do um so we're a not-for-profit government-backed campaign and we're helping everybody in great britain to understand the importance of smart meters and their benefits to people in the environment so you you may have seen some tv adverts talking about it recently we've got one at the moment of um albert einstein in the bath so you might have seen that on tv and but now that aaron has kind of given you an overview of lots of everyday technologies and features that could support you in your caring role i did want to talk specifically about smart meters and just go through a bit more information um specifically in regards to that and so i've got a few slides to show you and they're going to just give you a bit more detail about what smart meters are the potential benefits they could bring for you and the person that you care for as well as running through the installation process should be should you be interested in getting one and i'll finish off by running through some additional accessibility options that are also available and for smart meters just to make you aware of that too there's a smart meter and so a smart meter is the next generation of a gas and electricity meter and they're being installed in homes across great britain at no extra cost and to replace traditional analog meters that most of us have situated under the stairs or in boxes outside our homes and what smart meters do is they show you how much gas and electricity is being used as well as what it's costing you and it displays this on a small device known as an in-home display which is often also abbreviated to ihd and in terms of the how the smart meter system works so the smart meter will record your energy usage and then these meter readings are automatically sent to your energy supply using a secure system and the customer will then get an accurate bill reflected with this energy usage um and just to kind of go on to the point that was made earlier smart meters don't require the internet they use a separate system using radio waves so you don't actually need the internet to get a smart meter and go on to the next slide thanks ellie um so on the previous slide i mentioned this small device it's called the ihd that comes with your smart meter so on the photo on this slide you can see what a typical yhd looks like so it's that small black device which is next to the phone um if you can't see it particularly well we can obviously we will be showing the slides with you but that's kind of roughly what they look like but um energy supplies offer slightly different versions so you may have seen them and they may look different if you go to a kind of friend or a neighbor's house but despite what they look like all ihd should provide the following information and functionality so the first is that they show you your electricity and or your gas usage um and you can change this between how much you're spending in pounds and pence or how much you're using in kilowatt hours which is a very technical energy term kilowatt hours it's not something that most people are very familiar with but being able to see pounds and pence is a great way to kind of understand your energy a bit better you can also see your usage per day per week or per month and you can see whether you're using low medium or high amounts of energy depending on the kind of settings that you you put in there the second thing is it will show you a comparison of your usage in weeks and months so you can see how much you use this week in comparison to last week for instance and then thirdly the ihd will allow you gives you the ability to set budgets so on some ihds you can set targets in pounds and pens to help you budget for your daily weekly or monthly usage and so your hd will help you to monitor how you're doing against that target and then you can make changes around the home to ensure that you remain in budget and go to the next slide thanks and so how can a smart meter benefit you or the person that you care for and i should say that you know they're completely um they're completely up to you whether to get a smart meter or not they're not something that's mandatory currently but what we wanted to do is just make you aware of the benefits you can have informed decisions should you wish to get one and so like many carers helping the person you care for manage your energies probably one task out of many long lists of jobs that you may perform um but because smart meters send gas and electricity meters directly um to a secure network who pass them on to your energy supplier this means you don't have to take the meter readings neither does the person you care for which means you know you don't have to climb on a ladder or some stairs to try and get to a meter if it's you know hidden away or it's in the back of a dusty cupboard you know anything like that where they are often very awkwardly situated and that's so kind of like takes one thing off the list in respect that you wouldn't need to do that um smart meters also enable accurate billing which means that the person you care for only needs to pay for the energy that they actually use so this means you don't have to worry about calling your energy supplier if you know an unexpected bill comes through which is much higher that you then you're anticipating for instance um and then the ihd that i mentioned earlier that shows you in near real time the amount of energy that's being used in pounds and pence so this can make it easier to keep an eye on energy spending habits and just make kind of like small changes around the home to reduce energy where possible and and if you have what's known as a pre-pay meter so this is one where you have to often go to a store to top up in order to get your gas electricity there is a smart prepay version of this and the great thing about this is that it allows you to top up online by a telephone or text message or also via smartphone app and so no gas card or electricity um key is necessary but you can also still top up at the shop too and so we think that hopefully this all kind of helps create an enable great independence potentially for the person that you care for and go to the next slide thank you and so when arranging for a smart meter installation to take place all reasonable endeavors can be used by the supplier to identify where the customer has specific needs so for example if a carer would like to be present during the installation process and typically carers are able to make smart meter appointments on behalf of the individuals that you care for and but some suppliers will ask a number of security questions when you arrange the appointment so it is useful just to liaise with the person that you care for just to have all this information to hand and any carriers that are looking to act as a named third party should contact their supplier sorry the person they care for supplier to find out how they can be added to the account as a kind of more formal process and irrespective of the kind of how you get to the appointment the process should should still be the same so you'll agree um to a time slot and a date with your energy supplier so you can make that appointment over the phone it can also be done um via chat on their website um or via email as well and that just all the different kind of ways of contacting your energy supply will slightly depend on which one you're with but there should be plenty of options for you to make that appointment and i should also make the point that an installer should never turn up unexpectedly at anybody's home and say that there's an appointment unless you specifically booked that appointment so that's just something to be careful of and just make sure that you're aware of that and and when and when the smart i'm sorry when the insta installer comes along they should present a valid identity card upon arrival um and you can ask to see that um so you can ask when the installer arrives to see that and if they don't present it up front it's also a really good idea to make sure you know where the current meters are and just take steps to ensure they're accessible for the installer so if there's any kind of boxes or anything like that in the way if possible if you're able to move them if not just let your supplier know that there might be um some support needed in that respect generally it takes around one hour for an electricity meter and around one hour for a gas meter to be installed um it can be less it can be more depending on the um the property and your energy supply will be cut off during this period um but if you or the person that you support will need to be present um the insulation and if you have any health conditions that are relying on energy supply do you make that um do you make that point when the appointment um when you make when you you're booking the appointment um so that they know that you know that their health condition is relying on the energy supply not being cut off and they'll talk to you about um yeah different kind of approaches and to make sure that that's not going to cause any um undue distress or concerns and if you're having a gas meter installed and the installer will perform a visual safety check on the gas appliances just to make sure that there's no kind of safety concerns there and once the install once sorry once the smart meter is fitted the installer should show you and the person you support how to use the ihd um the in-home display that i mentioned and then they may also offer energy saving advice to you as well and then just the final slide thank you um so if anyone who's blind partially sighted or has difficulties with dexterity or memory loss an accessible in-home display which is known as an aihd could be easier to use and so this has been developed in partnership with the raw national institute of blind people the rnib and it includes features such as large buttons and audio functionality to read what's on that display screen and so if this is something that you would like instead of the standard ihd customers should just contact the energy supply for further information but it is worth noting that availability of this may vary so you'll just need to check that with your supplier and something that i thought was really worthwhile sharing with you is there's a company called geotechnology who produces a number of these aihds and they've got a really useful walkthrough videos and support materials on how to use a device and so i've included the link on this slide and we can send it afterwards as well so it's well worth looking at that if you want to just know a little bit more detail about how to use that particular device so i think that's it from me thanks for taking the time to listen
2021-10-03