Caregiver App: What to Log for Elderly Parents
SilverGuard Technologies Limited8 min read
A caregiver app for elderly parents should record six things and no more: what medication was taken and when, what was eaten, how the person seemed, any fall or near miss, appointments, and supplies running out. Everything else is either a note to yourself or a message to one person.
The six questions a family actually asks
Nobody installs a caregiving app because they want a database. They install it because at 11 p.m. they cannot remember whether the evening tablets were taken, and the person who would know is asleep. That is the test for every field in the app: does it answer a question somebody will ask at an inconvenient hour?
In practice the questions repeat. Was the medication given, and at what time? Did she eat, and how much? Was today a good day or a bad day, and in what way? Did anything happen that I need to know about — a stumble, a dizzy spell, a refusal? What is coming up that somebody has to be free for? And what is about to run out, so it can be bought before it does?
Six answers. Everything else — the long note about the visit, the photograph of the new chair, the complaint about the neighbour — belongs in a message, not in a record. An app that lets a family type anything becomes a chat thread with a search box, and a chat thread is what they already had.
The minimum record, field by field
The table is deliberately short. Each row earns its place by being read by someone other than the person who wrote it, which is the only justification a care record needs.
| Field | Why it has to be recorded | Who reads it | How often |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medication given, with time | The most common question at a handover, and the one with the worst consequence if wrong | The next carer, the family, the doctor at a review | Every dose |
| Food and drink taken | Appetite is the earliest visible sign of several problems, and it is the thing families ask about | The family, the nurse, the doctor | Every main meal |
| Mood and behaviour | A change that is written down becomes a pattern; a change that is remembered becomes an argument | The family, the care team | Once a day, plus any incident |
| Falls and near misses | A near miss today is the fall next month, and only a record shows the sequence | The family, the nurse, any clinician | As it happens |
| Appointments and calls | Something that is missed cannot be recovered, and the person who arranged it is often not the person attending | Whoever is taking the day off work | When booked |
| Supplies running low | The failure mode everyone knows and nobody logs until it has happened | Whoever does the shopping | Weekly check |
Two rules keep the list from growing. A field that is filled in once and never read should be deleted. And a field that requires a paragraph should be two fields: a value, and an optional note. A record that demands prose gets a sentence of prose nobody can compare.
Who sees what, and why that is a family question
A care record is read by more people than the person who keeps it, and the relationships between them are not neutral. Two siblings who disagree about how often to visit will read the same log differently. A helper who records that the daughter did not come for eight days is making a statement she may not have intended to make. The app is not the cause of that, but the design decides whether it happens.
The workable arrangement gives each person a role rather than a shared password. The person who does the daily care enters the daily record. The family who is paying sees the record and the appointments. The clinician sees what is relevant to a consultation. The parent — whose data it is — should be able to see what is written about them, and should be told that it is being written.
Under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486), a family keeping a record about a parent is handling personal data, and the parent is entitled to know what is held and why. In most families that is a five-minute conversation, and having it early is what stops the app from feeling like surveillance. Where the parent's capacity is in question, the conversation should include the person who holds the medical picture, not only the siblings.
The person entering the record is usually the helper
In a Hong Kong flat the daily record is most often kept by a domestic helper, and the design has to start there rather than at the family's imagination. That means Chinese as a first language of the interface, not a translation. It means big buttons and one screen per action, because it will be used standing up with one hand. It means it must work without a signal, because the bedroom at the back of the flat has none. And it means a person with a basic phone should not be required to write sentences.
It also means the record must be quick enough to survive a busy morning. A form that takes four minutes will be filled in for three days and then abandoned, and the family will conclude that the helper is not cooperating. A form that takes twenty seconds — a tap for the dose, a tap for the meal, a tap for the mood — will still be in use in week six.
The question to ask about any app is not whether it has a feature. It is whether the person who does the work will still be using it in a month, because a record that stops is worse than a notebook: it looks complete and is not.
What a caregiver app cannot do
It is not a medical record, and it must not be treated as one. A log of what was observed is not a clinical finding, and an app that offers a red flag on the basis of three taps is making a judgement it is not qualified to make. The doctor's letter, the discharge summary and the medication chart from the hospital are the clinical documents; the app sits beside them.
It does not replace a call. Families often install an app to reduce the number of conversations they have to have, and the effect is the opposite: a record that shows a bad week raises a question that a call would have answered. The app is useful because it makes the call shorter and better informed, not because it makes the call unnecessary.
And it does not create capacity that is not there. If nobody is doing the daily care, an app records nothing. If the family cannot agree who is responsible, the app will show the disagreement in a list of empty days. The organisational problem comes first; what a caregiver handover has to carry is the same problem seen from the other end of the day.
Five questions before you choose one
Can the record be exported, in a form a doctor can read? If the answer is no, the family's notes are trapped in a product that may not exist in three years. Can it work offline and sync later? Can more than one person use it without sharing a password? Is there advertising, or a subscription that renews without warning? And who owns the data — can it be deleted, and by whom?
Those five questions eliminate most of the market, and they are answerable in a single conversation with a vendor rather than a trial. The remaining choice is about fit rather than features: whether the interface is in the language of the person who will use it, and whether the fields match the six questions above.
Easikin is the caregiving line SilverGuard is building, and it is at planning stage rather than on sale. We are writing these requirements down publicly on the Easikin site because a care record is only worth keeping if the family trusts it, and the way to earn that is to state what the product will and will not do before anyone installs it.
Frequently asked questions
- What should a caregiver app record every day?
- Medication with times, food and drink taken, mood and behaviour, any fall or near miss, appointments, and supplies running low. Six fields. If a day has nothing to say on a field, leave it empty rather than writing "fine" — an empty field is information, and a page of "fine" is not.
- Should the person being cared for see the record?
- Yes, and they should be told it exists. The record is about them, and under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance they are entitled to know what is held. In practice, a parent who can see the log is less likely to experience it as surveillance, and more likely to correct something that was written down wrongly.
- Is a shared spreadsheet good enough?
- For one family member doing all the work, often yes. It breaks at the point where several people need different views of the same data, where the person entering it is on a phone with no signal, or where a clinician needs a summary. Those are the three moments an app earns its cost.
- Does the app replace the doctor's records?
- No. A care log records what a family observed; it is not a clinical record and it cannot be used to diagnose anything. Its value at an appointment is that it shows the sequence — when the appetite changed, when the confusion started — which is exactly what a fifteen-minute consultation usually lacks.
Explore more
- Easikin : the caregiving line, and the stage it is actually at.
- What a caregiver handover has to carry : the same record, read at the change of shift.
- Talking to families after a fall : what a record should make easier to say.
- Care home medication management : why the dose and the time are the two fields that matter.
- SilverGuard Insights : our other notes for families and operators.
- Easikin : the caregiving companion, in planning stage.
- Sanospark : for the afternoons when the record is not the problem.
- Legaris : for the documents that sit beside the daily log.
The product behind this note
SI (Superintelligence)-assisted caregiving
An SI (Superintelligence) · AI (artificial intelligence) caregiving companion for families and care teams — planning stage.
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When a subsidy, a policy or a care-home rule changes, you get one clear note.
We read the HK policy papers, subsidy circulars and care-home notices, then send one short note when something actually changes: what changed, who it affects, and what to do next. No fixed schedule — if nothing moves, you hear nothing.
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