It was always nerve-racking when we didn’t hear from our dad when we expected to. The VA gave him a 911 necklace, but he always hated to use it because he didn’t want to “make a fuss”. They also gave him a scale and blood pressure machine that reported virals directly back to them every morning.
But his hearing wasn’t the best so if he left his phone in his room, he wasn’t gonna hear you calling. We had couple of workarounds - you could shout at him through the ring doorbell on the back porch for one thing. We also had a couple of Alexa devices that were registered to me so I could set a message to play as an alarm at any time. We also got one with the video screen so you could “drop in“ and see the kitchen and shout through to the living room or just listen for signs of trouble. When that failed there was nothing for it but to just get in the car and drive the two hours.
We also toyed with getting him an Apple Watch that would monitor his heart rate so that we could keep an eye that way, but the chances of him remembering to wear it consistently were slim enough that it probably would’ve created more noise than signal.
We got to know the neighbors a bit better towards the end of his life so we did have that option too, which was also a relief.
Bottom line, it’s really not easy if you’re not there even with a whole bunch of technological hacks and a person who does not have many privacy hang ups. And there’s really no substitute for people close by who can actively look in. Awful to think that they didn’t have that.