Muskingum County Sheriff introduces “are you ok”?

ZANESVILLE – Only seniors, shut-ins, and disabled people who live in the county are eligible for the program. “Are you okay” uses a computer that will call you at a certain time each day and the program will ask you to press a button on the phone to the let the system know how you are doing.

“It’s a pretty neat program for, you know, some of those folks that maybe don’t have eye contact with another human being everyday that’s staying there and, really, you can even set it up to have two calls a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. It’s a neat program. We wanted to try it and we thought it was something else to help our citizens and also maybe to give some re-assurance or piece of mind to family members that don’t get a chance to talk to their loved ones every day,” Sheriff Matt Lutz said.

The calls that are sent out are monitored by the Sheriff Office’s Dispatch center.

“It’s a program that generates the phone call and then if the recipient doesn’t answer the phone call within two or three times then it generates a phone call to our dispatch center and we get that notice and then we’ll have interactions with the Sheriff’s Office trying to call back or maybe sending a deputy out to check on that person and check their welfare,” Lutz said.

For more information about this service, you can go to the Muskingum County Sheriff’s website or call the Sheriff’s main phone number and enter the extension 6160.