My mom is over 65. She lives alone in my childhood apartment in Romania, in the town where I was born, with two rescued cats and two dogs. She still teaches at the university’s computer science laboratories. She is independent, tech-savvy, and busier than most people I know.
I live in Lisbon. That’s a few thousand kilometers away.
We talk every week on the phone. Nothing dramatic – just chit-chat about our daily lives, the animals, her students, my work. It’s a good routine, and honestly, most weeks it feels like nothing has changed.
But I visit home twice a year, and visits are different from phone calls. On the phone, time stands still. In person, you see it passing. Each visit, I notice it a little more: we are not getting any younger, and after a certain age, health tends to move in one direction. Not because anything is wrong – she’s fine – but because that’s simply how time works.
The thought I didn’t want to avoid
There’s a category of health events that nobody can predict or prevent. A heart attack. A brain aneurysm. Things that happen suddenly, without warning, regardless of how healthy or active someone is.
I’m not the type to push these thoughts away and pretend that not thinking about something makes it less likely. I’d rather look at it directly. So I asked myself an honest question: if something like that happened to my mom, alone in her apartment, how would I find out?
The uncomfortable answer was: probably days later. Maybe when she didn’t answer the weekly call. Maybe when my brother visits.
I can’t prevent something sudden from happening. Nobody can. But there’s a big difference between finding out immediately and finding out too late. If I know, I can react. I can call my brother, a neighbor, call an ambulance, get on a plane. I can manage the situation with decency, on my terms, instead of being blindsided by it.
That’s what I wanted. Not control. Not prevention. Just to know.
“So you want to track me?”
When I first told my mom I was thinking about this, her reaction was immediate: no.
In her mind, “monitoring” meant location tracking, cameras, seeing which apps she opens, watching everything she does. And she’s a computer science teacher – she knows exactly how invasive that technology can be. She wasn’t wrong to refuse it. I would refuse it too.
It took a few minutes to explain what I actually had in mind, which was almost the opposite. No GPS. No cameras. No microphone. No reading messages, no browsing history, nothing about what she does or where she is. Just one signal: is the phone being used normally? She unlocks it, she picks it up, she uses it – like everyone does, dozens of times a day. If the phone shows no activity at all for a long time, that’s unusual, and only then would I get an alert.
Once she understood that the answer to “what can you see about me?” is essentially “nothing,” she was fine with it. She’s also, I should say, generally proud when I build something, and she hopes this one works out.
Why I built it instead of downloading it
I looked at what existed. Most of what I found fell into two categories.
The first is surveillance dressed up as care: GPS trackers, camera systems, apps that report location history to the family. These solve the problem by removing the parent’s privacy, and I think that trade-off is wrong. My mom is an independent adult, not a suspect.
The second is check-in apps that require the senior to press a button every day to confirm they’re okay. This turns care into a chore, and it fails in the most human ways — she sleeps in, she forgets, she leaves the phone in another room, and suddenly I’m panicking over nothing. False alarms are how these apps end up uninstalled.
I wanted something passive and quiet. Nothing for her to remember, nothing for her to change, nothing watching her. She just uses her phone like she always does, and I only hear about it if the phone goes completely silent for more than a day.
Since I couldn’t find that, I built it. It’s called Parents are OK: Senior Safety.
This isn’t really about an app
I’m writing this mostly for my friends, because many of us are at the same stage: parents around retirement age, often living alone, often in another city or another country. We all do the weekly calls. We all do the twice-a-year visits. And we all, at some point, have had that quiet background thought: what if something happened and I didn’t know?
I don’t have a way to stop time, and neither do you. What I found for myself is a smaller, more honest goal: not to prevent the unpreventable, but to make sure that if the day comes, I find out in hours, not in days.
My mom is getting old. So is yours, probably. That’s not a tragedy — it’s just true. The question is only what we do with it. For me, the answer was to make peace with the thought, talk about it openly with her, and put a quiet safety net in place that respects who she is: an independent woman with a full life, two cats, two dogs, and a son far away who wants to know she’s okay.
That’s all it is. And for now, that’s enough.
You can download the app on Google Play Store or Apple Store.