My mom is in a locked down senior independent living facility, my sister is in Texas, I'm in Colorado. We just finished our first family video chat. It was excellent. Really raised my moms spirits - isolation is tough on the elderly. I would recommend this for anyone wanting to keep in touch with family. We used the free "Zoom Video Chat" application. Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing There are paid versions too, but IMHO you don't need any of the paid features for family chats.
I was on a three year old Fire HD8 tablet, my mom was on a brand new Fire HD8 tablet, and my sister was on a many years old Samsung Android smart phone. We had excellent performance for this app on these lower powered devices. The Fire HD8 tablets are not even close to as powerful as the typical smart phone. We were all using WiFi for all connections, not cellular data. I do not know how Zoom would perform over cellular. The price for a Fire HD8 tablet that I just bought a few days ago was only $49 (that is the cost for Amazon Prime members, the regular price is $79). That is the cost of the tablet, the Zoom app is free.
I had moms new Fire tablet shipped to my house, where I installed the Zoom app and configured that with a Zoom login that I set up for mom from my home computer. I also preconfigured the tablets WiFi to be able to login to moms WiFi (there is a place under Settings where you can "Add a Network" - you put in the SSID and password). I made sure that all the volumes on the tablet were turned up to at least 90% so it would play nice and loud for her. I ran a couple of Zoom sessions between my tablet and moms to make sure everything was working while both tablets were still at my house. This also memorized my meeting id into moms tablet (shows up as a drop down of previous meetings in the "meeting id" field). Now, she doesn't have to type that in to join a meeting. As the host of a meeting, you should make sure to use your private meeting id and not the randomly generated id that the defaults to. That way, once you have "memorized" this meeting id under "previous meetings" on the remote tablet you no longer have to worry about coordinating meeting ids between sessions, since you'll always be using the same id.
After all this preconfiguring and testing, I dropped the new tablet off at my moms senior living place front desk, and one of her caregivers picked it up and took it to her apartment. It connected to her WiFi automatically (my preconfiguration worked!) Then the caregiver helped mom login to a Zoom meeting that I hosted (mom could not have done that on her own). My sister joined too, and we all have great video and audio.
The only limitation of the free Zoom account that might bother some people, is that meeting with more than two people on them are limited to 40 minutes. That's actually a pretty long time. But if you want to go longer, you can get a paid version of Zoom. Or even easier, hang up at 40 minutes, then immediately re-establish a new meeting for another 40 minutes. Near the end of our 40 minutes today, a message popped up telling us that they were extending the meeting past the 40 minute limit. This may be something that Zoom is doing now, with all the people trying to use it during the coronavirus. I don't know their reason, but it was nice of Zoom to do this.
What I am doing next is trying to set up Zoom on my moms computer. I have full remote access to that computer. So far I have installed the Zoom client there and begun on initial setup. The reason I am trying to set this up on her computer too, is so in the absence of her caregiver, I can do everything from my end - start up her client, log her in, attach to a meeting, etc. All's I have to do is tell her to sit down in front of her computer and let me do all the rest. This way of doing things is available to me because previously, before coronavirus when I could still get into her apartment, I had installed a webcam, microphone and speakers. Not to mention the remote control app on her computer. In my case, mom runs Linux and I had SSH access (command line) to that. Also, I had screen mirroring type access to her computer via VNC. You need all this stuff to be able to remotely start up a Zoom session on a computer. The tablet method is much easier, IF your family member can operate the tablet or has a caregiver who can.
If anyone wants to try something like this for their family, I will be glad to help if I can, provide my experiences, settings I chose, etc. I could post screenshots of my settings here, and things like that. If needed, I can host a Zoom meeting, invite you (gosh, we'd actually get to see what each other look like!), and we can do some testing and work through possible issues you may have (like no audio or no video - always seems to be an issue initially, until you find the unmute button and figure out how to turn your camera on). Then once you're an expert too, you can move on to hosting your own meetings for your family. I shouldn't imply that I'm an expert. I just learned all this Zoom stuff over the last few days. So I'm actually a newbie. But I learned enough to get things working. Just send me a private message if you want help and we can exchange phone numbers, email addresses, whatever, to facilitate live communication.
Heck, if things get bad enough with isolation and we all get bored enough, we could set up a Zoom meeting for Homesteading.org folks to join and chat on. Might be interesting to actually see and hear each other. Or it might be scary. I'm betting on scary. But whatever...
I was on a three year old Fire HD8 tablet, my mom was on a brand new Fire HD8 tablet, and my sister was on a many years old Samsung Android smart phone. We had excellent performance for this app on these lower powered devices. The Fire HD8 tablets are not even close to as powerful as the typical smart phone. We were all using WiFi for all connections, not cellular data. I do not know how Zoom would perform over cellular. The price for a Fire HD8 tablet that I just bought a few days ago was only $49 (that is the cost for Amazon Prime members, the regular price is $79). That is the cost of the tablet, the Zoom app is free.
I had moms new Fire tablet shipped to my house, where I installed the Zoom app and configured that with a Zoom login that I set up for mom from my home computer. I also preconfigured the tablets WiFi to be able to login to moms WiFi (there is a place under Settings where you can "Add a Network" - you put in the SSID and password). I made sure that all the volumes on the tablet were turned up to at least 90% so it would play nice and loud for her. I ran a couple of Zoom sessions between my tablet and moms to make sure everything was working while both tablets were still at my house. This also memorized my meeting id into moms tablet (shows up as a drop down of previous meetings in the "meeting id" field). Now, she doesn't have to type that in to join a meeting. As the host of a meeting, you should make sure to use your private meeting id and not the randomly generated id that the defaults to. That way, once you have "memorized" this meeting id under "previous meetings" on the remote tablet you no longer have to worry about coordinating meeting ids between sessions, since you'll always be using the same id.
After all this preconfiguring and testing, I dropped the new tablet off at my moms senior living place front desk, and one of her caregivers picked it up and took it to her apartment. It connected to her WiFi automatically (my preconfiguration worked!) Then the caregiver helped mom login to a Zoom meeting that I hosted (mom could not have done that on her own). My sister joined too, and we all have great video and audio.
The only limitation of the free Zoom account that might bother some people, is that meeting with more than two people on them are limited to 40 minutes. That's actually a pretty long time. But if you want to go longer, you can get a paid version of Zoom. Or even easier, hang up at 40 minutes, then immediately re-establish a new meeting for another 40 minutes. Near the end of our 40 minutes today, a message popped up telling us that they were extending the meeting past the 40 minute limit. This may be something that Zoom is doing now, with all the people trying to use it during the coronavirus. I don't know their reason, but it was nice of Zoom to do this.
What I am doing next is trying to set up Zoom on my moms computer. I have full remote access to that computer. So far I have installed the Zoom client there and begun on initial setup. The reason I am trying to set this up on her computer too, is so in the absence of her caregiver, I can do everything from my end - start up her client, log her in, attach to a meeting, etc. All's I have to do is tell her to sit down in front of her computer and let me do all the rest. This way of doing things is available to me because previously, before coronavirus when I could still get into her apartment, I had installed a webcam, microphone and speakers. Not to mention the remote control app on her computer. In my case, mom runs Linux and I had SSH access (command line) to that. Also, I had screen mirroring type access to her computer via VNC. You need all this stuff to be able to remotely start up a Zoom session on a computer. The tablet method is much easier, IF your family member can operate the tablet or has a caregiver who can.
If anyone wants to try something like this for their family, I will be glad to help if I can, provide my experiences, settings I chose, etc. I could post screenshots of my settings here, and things like that. If needed, I can host a Zoom meeting, invite you (gosh, we'd actually get to see what each other look like!), and we can do some testing and work through possible issues you may have (like no audio or no video - always seems to be an issue initially, until you find the unmute button and figure out how to turn your camera on). Then once you're an expert too, you can move on to hosting your own meetings for your family. I shouldn't imply that I'm an expert. I just learned all this Zoom stuff over the last few days. So I'm actually a newbie. But I learned enough to get things working. Just send me a private message if you want help and we can exchange phone numbers, email addresses, whatever, to facilitate live communication.
Heck, if things get bad enough with isolation and we all get bored enough, we could set up a Zoom meeting for Homesteading.org folks to join and chat on. Might be interesting to actually see and hear each other. Or it might be scary. I'm betting on scary. But whatever...
