Salon.com > Mobile Apps

Beleaguered caregivers getting help from apps

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — As her mother and father edged toward dementia, Nancy D'Auria kept a piece of paper in her wallet listing their medications.

It had the dosages, the time of day each should be taken and a check mark when her folks, who live 10 miles away, assured her the pills had been swallowed.

"I work full time so it was very challenging," said D'Auria, 63, of West Nyack.

Now she has an app for that. With a tap or two on her iPhone, D'Auria can access a "pillbox" program that keeps it all organized for her and other relatives who share in the caregiving and subscribe to the app.

"I love the feature that others can see this," D'Auria said. "I'm usually the one who takes care of this, but if I get stuck, they're all up to date."

From GPS devices and computer programs that help relatives track a wandering Alzheimer's patient to iPad apps that help an autistic child communicate, a growing number of tools for the smartphone, the tablet and the laptop are catering to beleaguered caregivers. With the baby boom generation getting older, the market for such technology is expected to increase.

The pillbox program is just one feature of a $3.99 app called Balance that was launched last month by the National Alzheimer Center, a division of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx.

Zynga slashes games and jobs in effort to regroup

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 15:42:00 +0000

Zynga dealt a blow to time wasters and procrastinators when it ended several of its games yesterday as part of a wider retrenchment, TechCrunch reported.

The social gaming company skyrocketed into the collective brainspace with addictive fare like the simulation "FarmVille" and "Words with Friends." But the public markets haven't been kind to the company. Its ongoing restructuring effort involves cutting more than 100 jobs, closing offices and eliminating more than a dozen of its titles.

TechCrunch wrote that, "Investors feared it had become bloated, free virality on Facebook had been curtailed, competitors were proliferating, and the shift of Facebook users to mobile from Zynga’s stronghold on the desktop canvas would break the company."Zynga went public in December 2011 at $10 per share. On Monday morning it was trading at $2.37. It has not traded above $4 since July.

Games shut down this month include "PetVille," "Mafia Wars 2," "FishVille," "Vampire Wars," and "Treasure Isle."

TechCrunch:

Apps for kids are secretly collecting information

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:52:00 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission released a report Monday, which shows that most mobile apps for children are secretly collecting information and sharing it with third parties.

Of the Google Play and Apple Store apps reviewed, only 20 percent disclosed any information about the app’s privacy practices, while almost 60 percent of the apps were found to be transmitting information from a user's device to third parties, such as the app developers, advertising networks or analytics companies. Fourteen apps out of hundreds surveyed were also found to transmit the location of the device and the phone number, the FTC found.

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act requires online service operators for children under 13 to get consent from parents before collecting and sharing personal information. Based on its findings, the FTC announced Monday investigations to determine if certain mobile apps developers have violated COPPA.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz commented in a written statement: