<story><title>Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...</title><text>My wife is a stay at home Mom and is bored - unfortunately she doesn&apos;t have the best formal education credentials but she is far from stupid. However this does heavily impact her ability to get a job that pays much more than minimum wage, usually labor intensive. She has a herniated bulging disc in her lower back, so I&apos;d prefer her not do a lot of manual labor all day. I wanted to hear from you guys what sort of entrepreneurial endeavors she might embark on with my programming/web expertise and a little bit of cash backing her. The catch is, she needs to be able to do it from home. She doesn&apos;t need to get rich - even earning ~$1000/mo would be acceptable as long as the man(woman) hours to money earned ratio is reasonable. Ideas?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>prbuckley</author><text>Skype for the sick, create a service that does scheduled calls (ideally video calls) to the elderly and infirm for a fee.&lt;p&gt;I had this idea because my father suffers from Parkinsons disease and gets quite lonely in the house during the day. He lives in Florida and I life in California and I can&apos;t call him as much as I would like to given the time difference. I know he gets lonely and would love to just have a conversation with someone during the day. I would pay to have someone skype him for 20-30 minutes in the middle of the day just to provide some conversation.&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that there are many other people who are in my situation with sick or elderly relatives. I know I would pay for a service like this and you would be bringing happiness into peoples lives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manmal</author><text>That&apos;s not only for the sick and elderly, but for all lonely people. I have actually thought about such a service a while ago, because I read about those online leeches who pretend to be poor girls from a developing country (actually they are mostly middle aged men). They keep in contact for years, urging their &quot;host&quot; to send them money to support them, and sometimes even help the host find a job when he is fired. The hosts readily send even huge sums just so they can connect to somebody emotionally. This clearly shows there is a lack of warmth and connection for people in our society, and I can think of better ways to help them than through online leeches.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...</title><text>My wife is a stay at home Mom and is bored - unfortunately she doesn&apos;t have the best formal education credentials but she is far from stupid. However this does heavily impact her ability to get a job that pays much more than minimum wage, usually labor intensive. She has a herniated bulging disc in her lower back, so I&apos;d prefer her not do a lot of manual labor all day. I wanted to hear from you guys what sort of entrepreneurial endeavors she might embark on with my programming/web expertise and a little bit of cash backing her. The catch is, she needs to be able to do it from home. She doesn&apos;t need to get rich - even earning ~$1000/mo would be acceptable as long as the man(woman) hours to money earned ratio is reasonable. Ideas?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>prbuckley</author><text>Skype for the sick, create a service that does scheduled calls (ideally video calls) to the elderly and infirm for a fee.&lt;p&gt;I had this idea because my father suffers from Parkinsons disease and gets quite lonely in the house during the day. He lives in Florida and I life in California and I can&apos;t call him as much as I would like to given the time difference. I know he gets lonely and would love to just have a conversation with someone during the day. I would pay to have someone skype him for 20-30 minutes in the middle of the day just to provide some conversation.&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that there are many other people who are in my situation with sick or elderly relatives. I know I would pay for a service like this and you would be bringing happiness into peoples lives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdfprou</author><text>You should check out TAGLab at the University of Toronto. They  are working on a very similar problem. One of their projects involves a touch-sensitive picture album where the patient can request interaction with a loved one. The patient taps a picture and a notification goes to the recipient, and on the other end the recipient can take a photo or write a note or record a video to send back.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://taglab.utoronto.ca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://taglab.utoronto.ca/&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>