[00:00:00] Speaker A: They, you know, this is the traditional thing. Well can they, can they program their VCR to, to record? That's probably past sight by now. Now it's, now it's, can they manage what's coming at them from email, from text, from calls? And how do you protect them? And how do you, how do you figure out what tech to use at the appropriate age? [00:00:33] Speaker B: Good afternoon, Mr. Clark. How are you? [00:00:35] Speaker A: I'm fine man. How are you? [00:00:36] Speaker B: I am. [00:00:37] Speaker A: Got an interesting topic today. [00:00:39] Speaker B: We do have an interesting topic today. We're, we're, we're for our listeners, our longtime listeners, you know, we have talked a little bit about things like assistive access in the past and we've talked a lot about ways that we might be able to help kind of lock down our loved ones phones who might be vulnerable and put them in a state that they still can communicate. They still get to get to speak with their friends or text and email and those kinds of things. But we want them to stay safe. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that today and we're going to probably be all over the board, so hang with us and we'll see where this goes. So what do you think Bobby, are like some of the, what are your pain points? So I know, I know your mom is actually probably a little bit more vulnerable than she has been at this point. So, so tell, tell us. [00:01:31] Speaker A: So you know, I'm, I'll break it down like so as you come through this conversation of life journey with your parents, what most parents are probably dealing with is how do I protect my kids, right? And there's lots of features out there for protecting children and it's not everything but it certainly gives you a lot of options of like how do you monitor what they download, how, how do you monitor who calls them, how do you monitor who texts them? But when you're in a situation like you and I are in, and I think many of our users are in where now it's parents and they're not used to the, because most of the time we're talking about parents older than we are. So they're baby boomers and you know, children of the 60s and 70s kind of thing and you start to see maybe unfortunately some level of decline in what they can do. So and that's what happens with my parents. They, you know, this is the traditional thing. Well can they, can they program their VCR to record that's probably passed away by now. Now it's now can they manage what's coming at Them from email, from texts, from calls, and how do you protect them? And how do you. How do you figure out what tech to use at the appropriate age? So there's kind of a light touch, right, which is, hey, I want to help you. And I think a lot of remote control kinds of processes that are out there are good for that. And we talked about some of them, like TeamViewer and Apple's built into remote access and so does Google and a few other items. And, you know, and I want to rehash all of that because I think there's. There's probably things that have a better take on that, but you get into it first like that. Okay. They call you up, they can't print. You at least want to look at your screen and say, click that button, move this item, do that thing. Right. But as you get further along on your journey, sometimes your parents need more than that. So now you have to go into not just, I want to help you when you have the problem, I want to prevent you from having the problem. Right. So how do you prevent people from scamming them? How do you prevent people. The scam calls, the endless, you know, Medicaid part A, part B calls that you get. How do you manage that piece of it and give them an ability to get to where they need to be, whether it's playing music they like to hear or whether it's telling them that that text that they got is dangerous and they don't need to read it, they don't need to look at it. [00:03:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And do it in a. In a way, too, that respects them. Yeah, respects them. Respects their privacy best you can and keeps their autonomy and just like you said, respects them. [00:04:07] Speaker A: And so you could jump to the, well, I'm treating my parents like a kid and put them in kid mode and give them things that they can do. And certainly there's times where you may have to do that. Right. So my mother is in a situation now where she's rehabbing from a stroke, and so she does not have the dexterity or the capability to manage an iPhone or an Android phone in its full glory. So there's a great program that you and I have recommended a lot called Selective Assistive Access that can allow you to give your loved one the pieces of the phone that they can manage and maybe scale them up. So whether that's just limiting calls and music or now you put in things like text, now you have a simpler interface so they don't have to navigate all the icons and normal kinds of Interfaces you see on a phone, you can make it very simple. So you may have to do that. And Apple has been really good about expanding assistive access features that give you a lot of calls on that and we have talked about that a little bit and I know my mom and my father in law are on phones right now where we are managing that and my father in law can do a lot more than my mom can right now. So you can, you can, that has to be managed physically. You have to get the phone and do certain things, turn it on and run it. It's not the same as guided access which I know also exists on the Android phone where you lock them down into one application. This gives you a simpler interface that's [00:05:34] Speaker B: more of like a thing for a four year old who's in the backseat watching YouTube videos while you're driving. You don't want them to get out of YouTube by accident. [00:05:42] Speaker A: So yeah, so you can certainly use assistive access for that too. But what you want to do with this is give them an environment that it can live in and not get in trouble. But the other thing that I assume we'll talk about a little bit in this podcast too is that there are other applications out there that do more than that, that allow you to, to monitor websites, media, text, calls, location tracking, their cross platform. And some of them are paid and some of them are free. So we're going to put some information in the show notes about some of those options. I know we're going to talk about a few of them that are out there. Maybe the top three right now are something called Bark, it's something called, I'm going to call it Casidio. But you know everybody makes up a name and you don't know how to pronounce it. So we think it's cas Custodian. So we think this is Custodian or something, a flavor of that. [00:06:38] Speaker B: And Mobasip. Is that a different one? Mo Sip. That's an odd name too. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Mosip has got. And actually Mosip is named after law in the US that actually added features for parents to do this. It said that manufacturers have to offer these things so it attempts to try to address that law. So it's named after that. So Mosipi, something like that. [00:07:00] Speaker B: And then there's the big ones, you know, Apple Screen time and all the family access kinds of things that are built into Apple. And I think Google has something similar. Google family? [00:07:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's all Google family and it does the same thing. Those two are Moderate versions, but they're free. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. We got a lot of information. We're going to try to decipher through and talk through and we may not [00:07:23] Speaker B: do it all today, but we want to kind of give you an idea where we're going with this. So just to kind of lay it out for you, Bobby and I were having breakfast the other morning. As we do once a week, we try to get together early in the morning and have some breakfast and we just talk about everything this subject came up. And the thing that we kind of came down to is Apple. Since we're Apple guys, we're going to talk a lot about Apple. Apple does a lot for us, but they do about 80% of what's needed for a caregiver. And, you know, and we think that it would be really nice if we could get Apple's attention somehow and maybe see if we could talk with them about bridging that other 20%. Because there's a lot that could be done that wouldn't violate Apple's policies and make it insecure if we, if we did it right. So that's, that's some things we're going to talk about today and kind of play with the ideas and, and, and what, where we could go with that. [00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, so I invite you to start looking at that. If you're in a situation where that is becoming a need. You can experiment on your own phone, right? And there's usually ways that you could put it in and out of the limited mode and an unlimited mode. So now be careful. Don't forget passwords. [00:08:40] Speaker B: Don't lock yourself out. [00:08:42] Speaker A: Then you can't get out of what you're dealing with. You know, turn your phone into a simple grandma phone forever. So you need to write that password down, manage that well, let somebody else know what that password is. Use something common. I think it's like a four digit key on the Apple side and I think it's very similar on the Google side to get you in and out of it. [00:09:00] Speaker B: Just a quick little piece. [00:09:01] Speaker A: One tip, pro tip. I'll just throw in when you start experimenting with these kinds of things, passwords and passcodes for your loved ones probably are a bridge too far for many of them. We have learned, both of us have learned. We started off with passcodes on these modes and then we ended up saying, nope, going to take it away. Because at the end it becomes a conversation of how you type in the password and not how you do the function you want to do. So I'll just tell you right now, if you're starting on this assistive access journey, on this limited phone access journey, you need to really think about do you really need a password on it? And I'll say this as a security guy, I normally always say password your phone. But in this particular case, since you have a password to get in and out of the system itself, this is okay. It's all right. You've already limited it to phone and music. Believe me, nobody who wants a phone is going to steal a phone in assistive access. They just ain't going to do it. That's right. We've done that work for you. Skip to the end for you. You know, if, if you're, if you're in assistive access, you probably don't need a passcode. [00:10:13] Speaker B: Probably don't because it's it, you know, at that point remembering that passcode to get in the phone for, for some loved ones is, is, is a, is a big deal. They may remember it some days, they may not remember it other days. The whole, like a lot of times it's on older phones with, with also maybe like your thumbprint identification or maybe even face id. Those are cool. But if you, but honestly if you, if you're in this situation and you have things locked down properly, you don't need that. So yeah, that can be a bridge too far like you said. So gosh, you know, and while we're talking about that, passwords in general for a lot of accounts and stuff, if you're not already doing this, go ahead and keep your copy of those things for people. Like I have a whole section in my password database that's just for my dad and some is just for my, for my mother in law and some just for my aunt and my wife and my love. But my, my trusted folks know where that's at. So if you know by some chance I get hit by a bus, then at least somebody will know how to get to those things. [00:11:12] Speaker A: And you can do locks on notes for passwords, you can do sharing on notes for other members of your loved ones who, especially if you share the same common iPhone, Android, you can share things with people like that. And if, then there are other apps that allow you to do password sharing like Keeper and a few others out there like that that are worth the money to do. You can even go into things like, like Firefox and Safari and do family sharing on passwords for certain things too. So look at that. At the very least write a note, lock it and share it with your loved one. So, yeah, definitely going to do that. [00:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So let's take them out, talk a little bit about what they got. Right. Maybe with, with, yeah, with the system access. The things that, that I really have been pleased with is that they have locked things down in a way that you can say, well, what applications can be used? And you can say, you know, it's just not, just not Apple applications. They'll, they'll. There, you can have Apple, the standard Apple applications, and they will actually work better with assistive access than some of the other ones will. It'll look pretty clean there. The common theme is that there are big controls, they're big icons, they're, they're. Every screen has a back button on it to take you back to the main menu, things like that. They've done a really good job of that and they've done a good job of making almost any app work with it by overlaying the big black back buttons and that kind of stuff. But having said that, not everything's going to work perfect with it, but they've gone a long way with that. That's a good thing. [00:12:50] Speaker A: Another good thing is that they have named things in a way that if you're impaired, makes sense. So it's not phone, it's calls, it's not photos, it's, it's, there is photos in it. But you know, you can, you can actually limit things. Like I want them to see this album and this album, if they're in the music setup, you can say, you can create an album that's their favorite songs that you get put in. You could do theme kind of things like Christmas and Easter and kind of stuff like that. And you can, and you can actually control those things to show up in a very simple way and not as, you know, the Apple is really good for their interface and I'll tell anybody that they're easy to use in a lot of places. And so has Android done a lot of good stuff, but when you're at that point, the common names don't make sense sometimes. Interesting. So yeah, they allow you to make those kind of changes. So it's matches instead of text. It's those kinds of things that are a little bit easier to grasp. So, mom, you want to make a call, click on calls. That's. [00:13:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I think they do some good things too with like letting you limit things like what, what contacts are available to call, what contacts are or what people who are allowed to call in. I mean, it can be a certain set, it can Be everybody in the contacts list. It can be everybody, but you may want to be in a situation like where you want to say if they're in the contacts list, let them in, but if they're not in the contacts list, don't let them in. Send them directly to voicemail or don't even show up in voicemail for that matter. I think you can do that, just block the calls. [00:14:27] Speaker A: The other thing that's really nice about Apple phones and I think on Android too, is by using something on Apple called Focus, you can actually decide when calls happen. So you can schedule something like you can say that in this mode at night, say from 7pm to 7am no calls can go through except for the people you allow so yourself and a few others. So there are some neat controls there to allow you to schedule access. Is it everything I want? No, but it goes at 80%. And you certainly say my mother's doing therapy in the morning. I don't let anybody call her in the morning. [00:15:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:05] Speaker A: So she's not served by schedules. [00:15:07] Speaker B: You can, you can set the, set the focus modes based on that. [00:15:10] Speaker A: Yep, sure can. [00:15:11] Speaker B: Yep. And from my work with my own focus modes, one thing to remember with those two is you can, you can be pretty granular about them. You can say, I don't want anybody to be able to call them during this time period except for me and two other people or meet three other people or whoever. But you can get really, really granular with that kind of thing. Yep. I, I have some focus modes myself. That one of them is just, just my wife's name. That's the only person who can get through when I have this, when I have that thing set and I have some that, that even will, you know, in that case, nobody but her is going to get through to me. They're not going to call me, they're not going to text me. I'm not going to see any of that kind of stuff. I have some that are just her and my dad and a couple of other loved ones and that's it. So. And they come and go at different times. But it's really, really handy how granular they have made that kind of thing. [00:15:59] Speaker A: Another thing it does, right, is allowing you to associate pictures with people who call. So for my mom to be able to see who that is, not just see the name, but also see a picture helps her. I'm assuming we'll even help her down the road as her, as her condition, then dementia might get more and more heavy. Right. So knowing that kind of feature is there is nice. And building it in early makes sense too. There are a lot of things that did right. [00:16:28] Speaker B: Yeah they did. And you know, you made me think about the photos and the big contact names on there. They made this for. As I recall. They made this for what? For vulnerable people. People who might have a cognitive problem. They may not have good motor control. They may not have good vision possibly there's some things like that that they've. They've built this far. But it. It's not where I'm going with this is just not just for cognitive stuff too. Like I. I have an aunt who is perfectly fine cognitively but her vision's pretty bad. So there's the being able to have large icons and large photos of people to be able to call them and big text in the. In their messages and things like that. That. That's a godsend, you know. [00:17:11] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. [00:17:12] Speaker B: Yes. [00:17:14] Speaker A: And. And you can grow into this. You can do a fairly unrestrictive assistive access for people who are just beginning this journey. But just wanted a little simpler to. When you get to a point where okay, now the only thing that really you can do is click on the button and do one or two things. [00:17:32] Speaker B: So. [00:17:32] Speaker A: And you can try it on your own phone to see what it's like. So now makes me think do we need to get to. Into what they didn't do? Well because it's all. [00:17:41] Speaker B: We came from a management background where we like to do structure walkthroughs, things like where we like to call pluses and deltas. So the pluses are things that they did really well and deltas are things that we would change if we could to have them to do better. So go for it. What's your first one? What can I first. [00:18:02] Speaker A: First one is the daily maintenance behind it. So every month when I put things in assistive access I have to go to it every month and clear out all the unwanted calls and do all the updates and you know, unread the messages that come through. And there's no way for you to do that remotely. [00:18:24] Speaker B: You can't clean it up remotely. [00:18:26] Speaker A: You can't clean that up. So you have to get to the phone every month in which you know if you're visiting your loved ones out of that hard to do. But it would be really nice if I could not have to wait a month to get all those calls. Oh, their favorite cousin from down in the back has called 20 times. He's not on our list. Oh, I need to recognize. I'll Put them in the list. Be nice if we could pick that up early. So there's, there's stuff like that that I go, I wish we could have that. That would be nice. [00:18:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I could see that. Other things I think I would, would enjoy and if I recall right, I don't know that that FaceTime screen sharing is available in assistive access and that would be really handy to be able to, even in its, even in its simplified mode, to be able to take over their screen from remotely and show them how to do something or look at what they're trying to tell me and understand what's going on on their screen. So yeah, I think that is one that they could, they could add. I know they can do it because their Apple's own tech support can do that. It's not that, not that difficult to do from a technological standpoint, but I know they worry about security and they only want certain people to be able to do that. So. Yeah, I get that. But I think that's something that they could do in a. In a measured way that would not necessarily go past the security guidelines that they have in place. [00:19:50] Speaker A: Place. What's your. So my, my next one for things I wish that we could do. I'm trying to figure out how to say this particularly well. Their interface is not as quite fluid as I would love it to be. So there are a couple of things about the clicks that aren't natural that if you haven't used it before, that's why I strongly say to you, try this first. Make sure you understand what it's. What it's doing so you can explain it to somebody else so there are colors that don't match like all the phone calls. Typically we get this thing with phone calls and FaceTime audio. If you're not careful, you can put this in a situation where it's doing facetime audio all the time instead of making the actual calls. FaceTime model is great, it's got great bandwidth. But if you're on a limited plan, on a limited access, it's not the thing you want to do. It's going to eat up your data. So how do you make it so you could do one or the other and a little bit more clear about what you're doing. So if it's a green button then it's the phone. If it's some other color then it's the FaceTime it's. They're not consistent about that. I wish they were. [00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah. I wish there was a better way to explain that to like My dad, like so my, my. I, I use FaceTime audio with my dad a lot because he, where he's at, he doesn't get great signal all the time. [00:21:13] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:13] Speaker B: And he, he likes to use the, the speakerphone a lot. The combination of a speakerphone and not a great signal does not make for an easy conversation. Because even with trying to, trying to keep his phone in a voice isolation mode where it's, where it's, trying to just do the voices, I get all kinds of crazy clipping and Cylon and everything else. But if I call him with FaceTime audio, it sounds perfect. So I do that all the time. And he's gotten used to it. But they're trying to explain the difference between a regular phone call and a FaceTime audio call. It just doesn't work. Yeah, I just had to tell it, just trust me, it's going to work when you pick up. It's just fine. [00:21:58] Speaker A: The other thing that I wish they did is, you know, there's a part of the phone with stand up mode, but if you have a modern phone now, if you put it on the stand, it switches to a clock or something like that. Can't do that in assistive access. [00:22:11] Speaker B: Interesting. That's an odd one. I wonder why. [00:22:14] Speaker A: I, you know, they're probably trying to simplify it. I guess I get it. [00:22:18] Speaker B: I guess so. [00:22:19] Speaker A: But it would be, it would be nice if I put it on its stand and if it went back to a clock. And so I. You either have to, if you want that feature you have, you can't be in assistive access to get it. I wish that they would bring standard mode to assistive access. That would be, that would be interesting. [00:22:35] Speaker B: That would be really handy. And it could be in a more accessible form than maybe you can lock [00:22:41] Speaker A: it down to a couple of things where they don't have as many choices. [00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah, but you get one, one clock face and you get one calendar look and that's, that's, that's what you get. [00:22:49] Speaker A: Or you can set it that way. Something like that. Yeah, that would be nice. [00:22:55] Speaker B: So one of mine is like being able to allow a trusted person to be able to do these things to their phone. So, you know, Apple's got this concept of a legacy contact and that's, that's an Apple user that you designate who can get into your stuff if you pass away. And this seems like a middle ground here where it would be nice to be able to say, I want a legacy. I want to appoint a, I don't know, like an Intermediate legacy contact. Not a legacy contact, but a current contact that can have access to my phone. And I want them to be able to do it, and I want them to be able to do this and assisted access mode. I think that kind of thing would be helpful for doing the things like you're trying to do with, like managing email and managing messages and managing calls, you know, just, just the bare minimum, you know. Yeah, it doesn't have to do a whole lot more than that, but it would be nice to be able to appoint that somehow or another. I, I know there's probably some security things there that would be hard to, oh, to, to get over, but maybe, you know, these days, you know, I noticed the other day I was helping my dad set up an online account for Medicare. He, he, he moved recently and we were going in there to change his, his address. The vetting that you have to do to get an id.gov account now is pretty stiff. You have to take a photo of, of government id, send it up, and then do this funky little selfie situation that you do where it scans your face in multiple ways in different colors to verify that you are the person that's on that, on that government ID that you just sent them. So you'd think with something, a combination of something like that and the concept of a legacy contact, they should be able to do that and come up with something that would work. So, yeah, those are some things I wish they would change too. Can you think of anything else? [00:24:45] Speaker A: The managing their backup and data is still pretty rudimentary. So right now I do on my devices that you can schedule a backup. I don't think you can do that in assistive access. I think if you're in assistive access, it doesn't back up. [00:25:04] Speaker B: It doesn't back up. Yep. That's worth looking into too. [00:25:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So that would be nice to get some of those features that, that, you know, you're setting up to protect them. You know, the phone gets damaged or lost, you can do something like that. Loss mode in assistive access is not clear either. I'm not sure what that does. So they've lost it somewhere and I want to ping it. What does that do? [00:25:24] Speaker B: Right, right. [00:25:25] Speaker A: So there's some mend. I know this is going to happen over time. You know, system access is new, and I think it came out in iOS 17, something like that. And so I know they're going to add more features, which was. I'm kind of voicing some of the feature set that we were in, and we may do some things in the background with their feedback modes to kind of tell them some of these things too. But it's a good start. Just don't stop keeping adding on features to it. [00:25:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And I've got a lot of things I want to experiment with and I'm hoping that as I do those I can put out some short form stuff for. Not necessarily just for the audio, but audio podcast, but for our YouTube channel. YouTube has a great shorts capability where we can do short form video and we can show you some of this stuff as we do it. So I have this, this, this concept of a plan right now of diving into the details on some of these assistive access things and producing videos on it because basically I haven't found any good ones out there. So if you can't find them, then maybe there's something that you need to do. And that's what I'm going to try to do is come up and kind of fill that void a little bit and see if we can help some folks with that. Oh gosh. I'm trying to think of anything else that we could really wish Apple would do, but I think we've covered a lot of it as, as it is right now. You got any other input for today? [00:26:50] Speaker A: Dream features, you know, integration with calendar so I can block off certain things and say she's at a doctor's appointment or something like that to give. So my family who calls in thinks that something is wrong because mom won't answer the phone during those hours. I've said or is doing something. I would love for that to be a lot more reactive. But you know, the dream of the Google thing answering and said they're not available right now. They're in therapy, they're not available right now, they're at a doctor's appointment. That would be cool if we could get some help. [00:27:18] Speaker B: It seems like that that's doable kinds of things. They just kind of have to figure out how to do that in a way. [00:27:23] Speaker A: Figure out how to do it. [00:27:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:25] Speaker A: And you know, I know Apple Intelligence is eventually going to come and do some more features on the phone. I want to make sure that the systematic does get left behind in that. [00:27:36] Speaker B: I get the sense that it's kind of, it almost feels like a little side project for them and I would like it to come to the forefront a little bit more and I'm hoping that go ahead and put this out here. If anybody out there who's listening has any contacts at Apple in the accessibility side, let me know. Or let us know at care tech and tipsmail.com we would love to hear from you or if you have any wish list, kinds of things that you would like for Apple or Google to put in their assistive access sorts of things, let us know, maybe we can tell us, we can talk about it, maybe we can get it in front of them. And I've got some ideas of some folks that I know who I know some people who know some people who know some people. So there's possibilities that we might, could get in front of. [00:28:16] Speaker A: We all do so. [00:28:18] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Could get in front of some people at Apple who might pay attention if there is a community out here who is wanting that kind of thing or needing that kind of thing. So any, any input we can get from you guys, we really appreciate it and we can forward it on to the people who create these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a start. That's a rant from Bobby and I about things that we, we need and first of many, first of everybody needs. Yeah. And hopefully we'll have some more of these, but I hope you guys have had a good week and we appreciate you taking the time to be with us for a half hour here and listening to this. If there's anything that we can do for you, let us know Care Tech and [email protected] and other than that, you [00:28:58] Speaker A: subscribe and hit the notify thing if you're on YouTube, just absolutely give us some, some, some feedback on what, what you're hearing and what you think might mean here to improve. So yeah, this, we're growing in this too. But, but I think there's some really good starts to make you excited about what you can do. And obviously what we want to do is give the best environment to our, our loved ones. [00:29:20] Speaker B: And just to say it again, we're, we're growing internationally. We're see, seeing a lot of international listeners out there and we really are excited about that, honestly. It's very cool and we hope to see more. So give us a shout out and leave us a comment on YouTube or send us an email. We just love to hear from you and know where you're from and just tell us what we could do better. All right? [00:29:44] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. [00:29:45] Speaker B: All right everybody have a lovely couple of weeks. We'll see you soon. [00:29:49] Speaker A: Absolutely. Good day everybody. Sa.