6 minUpdated 2026-08-08
Decide who owns the phone
The first thing that usually goes wrong is responsibility. A phone bought by the family but expected to be maintained by staff falls between the two.
Write down three things before the phone arrives: who pays for the plan, who charges it every evening, and who changes the contacts when something changes. A note in the drawer goes a long way.
What makes a phone usable in a care setting
The environment places different demands than a private home.
- High ring volume — communal areas are louder than a living room.
- A screen visible in daylight that does not time out too quickly.
- A charging spot in one fixed place, ideally a wireless pad or a dock.
- A name or label on the phone, because phones move between rooms.
- No notifications or apps that staff have to clear away.
Faces instead of names
For someone who struggles to recall names or to read, a contact list works badly no matter how large the text is. A photo of a daughter is immediately meaningful in a way the word 'Daughter' is not.
In practice that means large, bright close-ups of faces — not group shots from a party. Four to six people is usually right; more turns it back into a list.
Personal data and privacy
A phone in a care home holds photos and phone numbers belonging to relatives. Assume the photos should stay on the phone and out of any cloud, and that no call logs should be sent anywhere.
CallByFace stores contacts locally on the device. No call logs and no photos leave the phone, which means the service itself does not require a data processing agreement for the calling screen. The mobile plan and the operator remain a separate matter.
What a calling screen does not solve
A locked calling screen is not a personal alarm and must not replace one. It has no monitoring centre, no positioning and no supervision.
Nor does it replace visits. What it removes is the step between wanting to call and actually calling — and for many residents that step is precisely why contact thinned out.
How a home usually gets started
Start small and review after a month.
- Pick one resident where staff can already see contact breaking down.
- Use an Android phone you have, or a second-hand one from 2019 or later.
- Set it up together with a relative, who chooses the photos.
- Agree the charging routine and fold it into the normal evening round.
- Review after a month: is the resident calling more, are relatives calling more?
Common questions
- Does the home need a procurement process for this?
- A licence per phone is a one-off purchase with no contract or subscription. How you buy it is governed by your own purchasing rules, not by us. We send documentation for functional assessment on request.
- Can several residents share one phone?
- Technically yes, but it rarely works. The point of the screen is that these particular faces belong to this particular person. A shared phone becomes a phone nobody recognises.
- What if the phone is lost?
- The licence belongs to you, not to the handset. We move it to a new phone free of charge — just get in touch.
- Can staff call in to the phone?
- Yes. Incoming calls work as normal, and the phone can be set to answer automatically if you want that.