Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

My grandmother has dementia. About twice a day, she calls my parents every 5 minutes, forgetting that she just hung up. The calls are always the same: "You live there now. Yes you have money. We came to visit you yesterday." This can go on for an hour or so.

My parents are incredibly patient, but after a couple of these calls, they'll just leave the phone to ring. The soundtrack of the phone constantly ringing in the house, and the guilt associated with not picking up, is unbearable.

My brother and I built a system where her calls get re-routed to a rotation of relatives to answer her calls, to spread the load. After a call with her, each person gets a 2 hour break (customizable). If no one is available to answer, or if everyone is on break, she gets a voicemail that my dad recorded that explains that we love her, that she lives there, all the usual stuff.

It's working beautifully.

We use a custom twilio number, some rerouting logic (which is easily configured in twilio), and an api endpoint to determine the next relative that will answer. There is also a minimal frontend to configure things like who is on the roster, their break times, a place to upload a recording, and see call logs.

These are the steps we took:

1. Get a twilio number

2. All incoming phone calls to the home phone are redirected to that twilio number [1]

3. If incoming number == grandma, request from an api endpoint the next relative to dial. Redirect her call to them.

4. If no one is available, play the voice mail

5. If incoming number != grandma, redirect the call to dad's mobile number [2]

[1] A child comment by macNchz noted correctly about "Selective Call Forwarding". This would have simplified the process and we could have skipped step 5, but our telephone provider did not offer it.

[2] Note that this is a bit of a compromise in the setup. The home phone never rings anymore and all non-grandma calls go to dad's cell. But they were happy to accept this.