Comment by sriacha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sriacha | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have suggestions for an simple audiobook/music player like this for the elderly and or those mild dementia? It should have large, tactile buttons, simple play/pause interface, volume control (ideally knob), and be able to read from sdcard or usb/

- I've used the Relish 'dementia radio' [1] before. Its a radio with support for reading from usb, but has no memory so useless for audiobooks. Very overpriced.

- The 'National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled' has excellent cassette type players [2], but they only take their cartridges. Ideally something this format but supporting usb/sd card

- Another comment [3] here suggests a smartphone with a macropad. this could work. they also built a custom solution.

[1] https://relish-life.com/en-us/products/relish-radio [2] https://blog.library.in.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/isl-t... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43818639

A Yoto player might work. They're designed for children. They have two knobs (with momentary switch) to control everything (and a small on/off button). They're designed to be usable by children who cannot read, primarily through Yoto cards.

These are just NFC type cards with with some kind of DRM. They allow your player to connect to an API, download the audio content (books, music) and store it locally for instant playback whenever the card is inserted.

Normally I hate vendor lock in stuff like this. But surprisingly they also sell "blank" cards. Using the app you can load any audio content "onto" them (same deal - audio is sent to cloud so it can be redownloaded if local storage runs out). These are pretty cheap and can be "wiped" and reused as many times as you want and you can write on them or mark them up. You can even design a specific image to show on screen when your custom card is inserted.

The hardware is good quality too and can survive daily life.

https://yotoplay.com/

If there is enough material on Spotify, you could grab one of those mini-keyboards with 6 or nine buttons and remap them to play/pause, next, previos, and just leave it on shuffle on one playlist?

I think that might be the easiest, or even one with 3 buttons and volume knob.

A cassette player and some tapes?

Simple, tactile, and they already know how to use it (and it's old knowledge, so they won't forget soon)

Hörbert

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