Things To Consider Before Buying A Smartphone For An Elderly

With our country moving towards absolute digitization, cell phones have become nearly a necessity among senior citizens as well just like everyone else.  However, since they were not born with a cellphone in their hands or did not need to use it for all this while, a high functioning and complicated phone might be more of a hassle than making life simple for them.

So team ItemMom decided to do some research and come up with few pointers to keep in mind before we decide to buy a phone for our parents or grandparents.

What is the purpose of the smartphone for the user?

First we need to check for the reason as to why the smartphone is needed? Is it to transact with the bank? Or to stream videos and make video calls?

Why do we need this information? There are a lot of smartphones available in the market. Buying them a top of the line iphone or a complicated windows phone may not be the best idea.  A budget android with a good internet connection is all you would require for the purposes mentioned above.

Does the user need any added assistive features on the phone?

The user may suffer from poor eye sight. So a device with tiny buttons or small screen may not be good. We might need to buy a phone which is compatible with hearing aids for a person who might have trouble hearing.  Similarly a person with movement issues (arthritis or Parkinson) may need a stylus to help with clicking on the needed app/buttons.

What kind of voice and data usage will the phone have?

Once we understand the type of usage, then we can look for phone with memory and RAM accordingly. It would be an absolute waste if the usage is only for skype conversations, o buy a phone with 128 gb inbuilt memory and 8 gb RAM. However, the same would be required if the elderly is tech savvy and has a lot of social media, streaming and whatsaap usage.

We might be used to smartphones and can operate it in our sleep too. But we must understand that the phone we are buying is not for us but is for an elderly and it should make their lives easy and not complicate it further.  The idea is to purchase a phone which has a clear and bright display, built-in voice commands, easy to navigate, light-weight and has a non-slippery body.