Quote from: Pmalek on November 15, 2018, 03:11:22 PM

A dead man's switch could be activated in the case that your friend doesn't log in to his computer and enters a password or code every 10 days for example. The moment he stops doing that someone else can receive access to his accounts.

Google has what is called Inactive Account Manager, maybe that could help.
https://myaccount.google.com/inactive?pli=1

Another possibility is that your friend creates emails for the future. The site https://www.futureme.org/ allows you to write an email that will be sent at a specific date in the future. There is a similar service here - http://whensend.com/

Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5s5dzz/dead_mans_switch_for_hodlers/

Using these centralized services would be even worse then putting seed words in your will, as OP mentioned.