Any tips for keeping mom safe at night?

My mom , when she was still mobile would get up at night and get lost in the house and scream fire when she saw a night light ..
I got a bed alarm . It’s a pad that fit under the sheet and bed pad that detects pressure changes . When she would try to get up the alarm went off and I could intervene . Worked well and we had no falls

Ring cameras are absolutely awesome. My person is, to the degree that she can be, aware that they are present. Don’t go all ‘privacy’ on me about the cameras. My BIL needs them for his mother but he objects because of privacy’. My person has accepted them from Day 1.

I have one in her Den that captures front door and back door as well as all the flooring in between. I have one in a spare bedroom that captures the hallway activity to the bathroom on that side of the house. I have another one in the living room that captures that area to that side of the house.

I have two placed in the kitchen. One captures the view from the kitchen to the living area and a good portion of the cabinet, where the dishwasher is located and the refrigerator. The other one is on the opposite wall that captures the rest of kitchen activity. The last two cameras are in the garage and in her bedroom. The one in the garage is perhaps the most entertaining. She uses her vehicle as a storage unit. The bedroom camera captures the side of the bed into the bathroom. I was able to set a privacy screen to avoid capturing things. I didn’t want to see or necessarily need to see. I have just recently added another camera in her closet as she has become obsessed with things and will stay up all night digging through papers in the closet. I am in the process of weeding a lot of that out.

All cameras have two way conversations; night vision; motion alerts with different sounds, so I know which one is being triggered, and they can be shared with a sibling or another caregiver to help keep an eye on things. The ring doorbell, especially.

I don’t know what I would do without these cameras. They enable me to verify medication has been taken, it has enabled me to be able to find lost things before she discovers they are lost (because I see her actually moving them). I don’t sit there and study the activity. I look only if there are a lot of alerts such as her pacing at night.

She has a bad habit of leaving the phone off the hook. I can reach out through the camera and tell her to please check all phones to make sure they are hung up. That’s very nearly an every day thing.

I realize it is a Band-Aid fix for what will eventually need to happen. For the time being, it is working. It gives me a bit of security, and it actually comforts her, too. She missed placed a ring yesterday and I was able to see when she had it on and then when she didn’t have it on, and figure out where we needed to look. We found it!

You can put her mattress on the floor or purchase a concave mattress, which are more difficult to climb out of.

Most senior falls happen at night on their way to the bathroom (even in AL facilities). Having your Mom do purposeful activity during the day will help wear her out physically and mentally so that she sleeps more soundly at night, For my very elderly Aunt we had her folding a large stack of kitchen towels and put poker chips in patterns. We had her read aloud to us. We walker with her to the mailbox and use a portable pedaling machine while she watched TV. She was able to get off the Tylenol PM for quite a while. Her caregivers had her bed blocked on all sides but one night she wiggled past them, got up and fell, breaking her hip. A classic occurence for seniors.

You may want to consult her doctor about sleeping meds so that your own sleep isn't interupted, as this isn't an optimal solution.

A baby monitor is one way to keep an eye on her. Koplouise has mentioned a bed alarm but many people find those go off too often with restless sleepers, a different option would be floor mat alarms or motion sensor alarms in strategic places. If it's simply confusing day and night there are special clocks that might help.

My husband would fall on his way to the bathroom, or coming out. I resolved the problem by getting a commode (It is free from Medicare), which I placed next to his bed. It is as big as a toilet and he sits on it to urinate. Basically he is doing his business in a bucket (mostly urinating) and I wash it and spray-sterilize it every day. When he couldn't get out of bed one night, and then fell out of it, I got a bed rail from Amazon for him to hold on to when he gets up to use the commode, which I have right next to his bed so he doesn't have to walk to it. No falls since. My husband is 100 and has had a small stroke, which affected the peripheral vision in one eye. While he has some STM loss, he does not have dementia (although he sometimes manifests some confusion about things), so he is able to
manage the commode, etc. without me. I dont know how it would work for others, but it's worth a try.

You mostly can't keep her in bed. You can try the kind of hospital bed that lowers all the way to the floor and put rails on it and foam pads on the sides. Then if she falls out of bed, maybe the fall won't be too severe. Yet my mom, who fell often, had one of those, and she was still able to get out of bed and fall.

The alarms....... meh. No one in the household will have any peace with alarms going off, and having to be on edge waiting for the alarm to go off, and when it does go off there's the problem of what to do next. Talk her back to bed? She's not reasonable and even if you do get her back to bed, she's probably going to get up again and there goes the alarm.

Alarms are a short-term solution until you get her into a facility where they watch over her 24/7 and you're at home getting a good night's sleep.

It's impossible to keep her in the bed. My mother (96) will get up every 30 minutes thinking she has to go to the bathroom.

I use a bed pad alarm to alert me so I can get to her room before she gets up and falls. The best option I've figured out is to push a huge, firm pillow (Amazon) against the side of the bed and then push a chair against the pillow to slow her down.

Just yesterday morning she pushed everything away from the bed with her feet and then proceeded to fall off of the bed. It's low so she wasn't hurt, but I was by that time exhausted and didn't hear the alarm because I had forgotten to turn it back on after the previous time I had gotten up with her.

It's a continual state of fight or flight for me and I'm not surprised at the rate of caregivers dying before their care recipient.

Couple of ideas from the hospital (I work as a RN):
1 - Get an alarm for her bed. Get one that is a pressure-sensitive pad that alarms every time she gets off it. You can put sheets and incontinence pads on top of it.
2 - Make sure she isn't get long naps during the day. Everybody needs about 4-6 cycles of REM sleep (lasting 80-100 minutes) daily. If she gets most of her sleep during the day, she won't sleep through the night. Limit naps to less than 90 minutes.
3 - Make sure she has a bedtime routine that helps her to relax. Time to void or move bowels, hygiene, relaxing activity (no blue lights from TV or phone)...
4 - Talk to her doctor. She has a sleep problem of not being able to stay asleep at night. There are medications that can help with this. Ask him/her about over the counter medications before you start any new substance. Most seniors are taking vital medications and you don't want to give something that has bad interactions with those other medications.

I can address the falling. I cannot address the getting up at night. We hired caregivers to ensure my Mom did not fall when she got up at night. She got up over 15 times in a 9 hour time period...sometimes as many as 32. We couldn't keep caregivers because most of the time, they were up and down all night.

About the falling...observe the falling. Does she crumple (collapse straight down) or does she fall forward, backward or sideways? My Mom had the most chance of falling when she was not awake when she started on her trek to the bathroom. It was always on the straightaway, never as she took a curve and always because her legs gave way.

As a result, I took her to PT and we had exercises to strengthen her abdomen muscles, basically an exercise called sit-to-stand. Then I made her do stairs so that she was better at automatically adjusting her balance, even when she was half-awake. If she is more likely to fall side-to-side, then that is a different set of abdominal muscles that need to be strengthened and balance that needs to be honed.

If you haven't already, a walker is much safer and better than a cane.

Motion sensor that has a remote for you in your room, to alert you when she gets out of bed. This has been a lifesaver for me, my father has Alzheimer’s, and this has just changed the whole ballgame. I got mine on Amazon.