Just because a technology can be built, is it acceptable?

Reading the employee microchip article – does it make you shudder?  Observe the development and evolution of modifiers for the word technology. Words like sustainable, appropriate, autonomous all come to mind. With the micro-chipping of employees – the convenience argument is ultra thin. But why would one think about a microchip for an ailing relative, aka an older adult? (Some say we will all get chipped eventually.)  Consider that these "chips will offer a convenient way to track people — especially those suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia."  But who will opt in to being chipped and tracked in that example?  Employees could opt out – but can a person with dementia opt out?  How different is being micro-chipped from wearing a band with identifying address information? For whom is the 'convenience' of micro-chipping offered?  And because it is possible, should it be deployed?

Because tech can be developed, so it is -- offering 'innovation' we learn to hate…  Twenty years ago, computer-generated robo-calls --calls made by a machine, aka ‘predictive dialing’ --  had not reached their adoption tipping point and family members still spoke on the telephone. Could the government help? Well, robo-calling was banned by the FTC in 2009. See how well that worked – Senator Susan Collins did what many do – she disconnected her home phone number, saying as many do – the 'Do Not Call' Registry does not work.  So she doesn't have a home phone now – like half of Americans in 2017. Isn’t that sad?  But robo-callers don’t care which phone they pester or whether you even answer – they make money just verifying that it is a real phone number and then selling it to someone else.

…Or innovation we will learn to fear. We saw a self-driving car maneuver in traffic in Mountain View, CA. There it went – a real-life videogame --with a driverless vehicle from one of the 19 or more self-driving car companies in Mountain View.  Remotely monitored, with a few ignored residents and a researcher or a consumer watchdog group expressing concerns – consider that cities have no power to enact their own restrictions.  Euphemistically referring to the reported need during testing for a human to take over as a 'disengagement' report, the technology apparently failed to respond to other drivers on the road.  Of course, it would be those unpredictable 'other drivers.'  Unlike videogames, where a crash alters the score or ends the game, disengagement is an interesting euphemism for a failure of a design algorithm. Consider the perfect ‘test bed’ of Mountain View – no bad weather, no steep hills, no rotaries or trucks.

…Or technology features that we don’t fear enough.  Having one's identity stolen can make a person justifiably paranoid.  But by then it is too late. Note that our most important information was made available in the Equifax credit bureau hack which resulted in 147 million possible victims – and consider the number of actual victims in 2017.  But we regularly give out just enough information to make it easy to fake or get the rest of what’s needed – so that hackers can steal from us or illegally use our identity for whatever they wish. Giving out our name and birth date on Facebook leads straight to our address, which leads to enough information to get the rest.  Given that being hacked has become a fact (or factor) of life, are we immunized from thinking about it, so that we think text verifications to our cell phones are normal, that telling strangers our date of birth and confirming our address is required, no matter which call center we are speaking with?   

category tags: 

vehicle/transportation technology-services, fraud protection

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/just-because-technology-can-be-built-it-acceptable

New Technology Offerings for Caregivers and Families

As summer winds down, innovators rev up.  August is winding down -- the calm before the autumn slew of activity.  Nonetheless, new milestones and partnerships were announced this month, including Embodied Labs becoming a finalist for the Top8 XR Education Prize sponsored by the Bill  Melinda Gates Foundation,  MedMinder reaching 1433 on the Inc5000, the acquisition of GreatCall by BestBuy, and MobileHelp announcing a partnership with LifePod.  And four companies released new offerings to help professional and family caregivers improve monitoring and well-being among older adults:

FallCall and FallCall Lite.  FallCall Solutions announced today that the company has launched its second product, FallCall™ Lite, a Personal Emergency Response System (PERS) app built exclusively for Apple Watch and iPhone. FallCall Lite's unique features include Voice Activation using Siri®, Elder Apple Watch battery power monitoring by Caregivers, and a fully integrated subscription-based central monitoring service. The central monitoring service, staffed by trained Emergency Medical Dispatchers, provides real-time emergency event updates through electronic messaging to up to 5 Caregivers on their iPhone or Apple Watch simultaneously and is available 24/7. Learn more at FallCallLite.

Keenly Health. Keenly Health is the leading developer of advanced biomonitoring technology for use in senior living facilities and home health. Using state-of-the-art Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radar, Keenly Health intelligently monitors vital signs and patient activities to provide a distinctive window into a resident’s current and future health state. Keenly Health’s Big Data platform will analyze and compare gathered data continuously and quickly detect changes and trends to help identify exacerbations of chronic disease and help avoid the development of complications such as pressure ulcers, falls, and infections. Learn more at Keenly Health.

MedaCube. Keeping on top of medications can be challenging for seniors and their caregivers. People with memory issues might struggle especially with sticking to an accurate medication schedule. This is a source of worry for caregivers, too. With MedaCube, caregivers can simply pour up to 90 days’ worth of doses into the machine’s bins, and tell the machine how much to dispense, and when. A clinical study conducted by St. John Fisher College shows MedaCube improving medication adherence in a group of patients from an average of 48% to an amazing 97%. Learn more at MedaCube.

Zanthion. This is a technology-based senior care solutions company, is making both in-home and facility-based senior care drastically easier, all while maintaining the dignity of aging patients that is so often lost in the end-of-life care process. Evidence has begun to emerge suggesting that quality of care in assisted living facilities has been declining, in many cases due to inadequate staffing numbers – and sometimes the consequences are tragic. Zanthion has developed attractive and comfortable wearables, such as beautifully-designed necklaces and watches, that act as  personal emergency response systems for seniors, accurately assessing any needs for assistance (emergency and non-urgent) and directing them automatically to the appropriate party. Learn more at Zanthion.

 

category tags: 

Mobile PERS, IoT and home monitoring, fall prevention, fall detection, medication management, Family caregivers

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/new-technology-offerings-caregivers-and-families

Robocalls and scams -- a phone-based war against us all

Many years ago, when the phone rang, we eagerly picked it up.  That was then. For good or ill, families want to text, message and chat. And the phone call has turned into a source of harassment and scams. Robocalling is a modern torment, sometimes multiple back-to-back dials from the same source, often spoofing our own cell phone numbers – where answering the phone puts us on a ‘sucker list’ sold to other scammers. Is it Rachel from Cardmember Services or the IRS Phone Scam,  a fake carpet cleaning offer or worse, the disabled veterans scam, or the grandparent 'this is your grandson' scam? 

The list of scams is long – the solution list is short.  The National Council on Aging (NCOA) offers up an intriguing set of scams (a.k.a. crimes) like the two-person ‘pigeon drop’.  AARP’s list of suggestions is simple and even patronizing: "Stay alert" and "Give them nothing." The FTC advice includes "don’t pay for something that is a free gift."  And then there’s advice from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) – which is nothing more than the list from NCOA.  The New York Times list offers up a 'Can you Hear Me' recommendation to reply "I can hear you" versus saying “yes”, which is recorded for other fraudulent uses.

Scams of the elderly is now a $37 billion industry.  Scam revenue (and some say underestimated) has reached $37 billion annually – making scamming the elderly an industry that attracts new and creative entrants on a regular basis, equal in revenue to book publishing industry. New scams appear and can be especially devastating – like the cell phone port-out scam (saying your phone was stolen and needs to be 'ported' to another device.) Or scammers grabbing that 'send a text message identifier' used to confirm a financial transaction. 

What are the carriers doing to prevent phone-based scams?  Not much – according to consumer advocates. Despite complaints of every type and 2.4 billion robocalls per day, the best that has emerged is possible blocking of calls from numbers that could not exist. So far, though, the burden is mostly on the consumer, with the best suggestion ‘white-listing’ those you want to hear from (really?) and blocking the rest – or paying for a smartphone app.  Despite lawsuits and judgments against carriers and scammers, the burden for stopping or preventing is on the consumer.  No wonder we hesitate to answer the phone.

category tags: 

cell phones, smartphones, fraud protection

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/robocalls-and-scams-phone-based-war-against-us-all

Best Buy Acquires GreatCall – What’s it Mean for Best Buy?

First take – this links together multiple Best Buy initiatives, starting in 2011.   Look at the history of Best Buy. First a dabble with the now departed Wellcore in 2011 – clearly the time was not right – the oldest baby boomer turned 72 in 2018, but at 65 in 2010, consumers could not comprehend the utility of a wearable fall detector. But Best Buy executives saw the opportunity and decided to learn more.  More significant in 2011, Best Buy became a founding consortium member in a ‘living lab’ Charter House in Rochester, Minnesota (along with Mayo Clinic). "We believe technology has the potential to foster healthy, productive lives by enabling easier access to information and medical care," says Kurt Hulander, then senior director of health platforms at Best Buy.  

Best Buy revs up interest in senior caregiving in 2017. Then came a few years of observation, not to mention struggling store business results (2014) in the face of rising online competition.  It had already seen (and revamped) the service opportunity with Geek Squad, in 2012, partnering with AARP.  Helping older people with technology in their homes – could that have revealed a sizable customer base of opportunity for more services?  By 2017, Best Buy had begun a limited offering of a contracted service called “Assured Living” that uses remote monitoring and other technologies to help older adults, then rolled it out broadly later that year, now in 21 cities across the US.  In 2018, it began loud hints about the opportunity in health technologies and the elderly.

Today, Best Buy increasingly is a services company.  Besides Assured Living advisors, along with its 20,000 Geek Squad workers, now its offering an in-home technology advisor service (note the example in that article about a visit to the Villages in Florida).  With all of that successful investment in people and services, what else could Best Buy need? How about a large call center well-trained on speaking with and providing technology advice to older people, offering responses to users of phones and personal emergency response pendents? So the acquisition yesterday of GreatCall can be viewed in this larger context -- a steady progression of filling in an increasingly robust menu of offerings to serve the 50 million people aged 65+ in the US and their family members. 

What is Best Buy getting for its $800 million?  Quite a bit, and likely what it does not have.  Best Buy has long partnered with GreatCall, offering its products in the store. Besides 900,000 service subscribers, Best Buy acquires an employee base familiar with the older adult market (one of the few $300 million firms that can make that claim).  In addition, Best Buy acquires a series of small-dollar apps and services that can provide substantial value to older adults – including MedCoach, CheckIn Calls, UrgentCare, and Wellness Calls – among others. Does all of this mean (as much media has nonsensically declared), that Best Buy is moving into the healthcare market? No more than it was in it previously – GreatCall was not in that market – it was in the market of serving older adults with engagement, connection, and safety technologies.  To date, none have viewed these capabilities that way, or GreatCall’s price would have been more like Amazon’s $1 billion purchase of PillPack – paying more but getting less.

category tags: 

Mobile PERS, cell phones, smartphones, IoT and home monitoring

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/best-buy-acquires-greatcall-what-s-it-mean-best-buy

Six Tech (Aging and Health) Blog Posts from July 2018

Voice First technology – triaging the healthcare opportunity.  This week’s Voice of Healthcare Summit in Boston offered up some intriguing attempts to create new Voice First interfaces that inform patients, streamline work, and demonstrate potential (like Answers by Cigna) in versions 2, 3 and beyond.  One of the most intriguing presentations – KidsMD – a Boston Children’s Hospital ‘accelerator’ initiative begun in 2016 and is winning over the staff.  The organization is clearly committed to using Voice First interfaces for patients, for internal questions (“Who is the Charge Nurse on 7 South?”), for hands-free operating room checklists, for post-discharge guidance and for home health (100,000 interactions to date).  They’ve added a skill called AskICU that highlights the potential for ‘hands free, eyes free’ questions that have easy (but difficult to find) answers, like available beds on a floor, or detailed answers like “Medication dosage details from the Code Cart”.   The other hospitals in Boston are well aware of the innovation at Children’s, but other than experiments (like one at Beth Israel Deaconess), nothing of the scope of KidsMD has materialized.  More on this topic during August.  In other blog posts from July:

The crushing clutter of the Internet -- as irritating as non-stop telemarketing calls.  The business model of the Internet is crushing us.   Rant on. We could start with Twitter, which is deleting millions of bots, trolls, and other fake accounts (often with automated software generating hundreds of tweets per day).  This is raising concerns over the company's growth and true number of monthly users. But it's not raising concern about the business and social value of Twitter. Has anyone looked at the age distribution of Twitter users? Only 8% are 65+, and the biggest block is aged 18-29.  Consider that its share price and profit of $61 million in Q1 2018 are tied to growth in "legitimate human users -- the only ones capable of responding to the advertising that is the main source of revenue for the company." Translate: capable of responding because they are human 18-29 year-olds, not necessarily because they have money to spend. Read more here.

Four issues that should matter much more – to consumers and tech firms.  Dog days – these are the hottest days of summer, according to that Oracle of modern culture, Wikipedia.  As the glow and racket from fireworks fade, it's time to mull over the thoughts that zipped by in recent months, perhaps not noticed, but are worth another consideration.  All four of these posts are about our technology life, as shoppers in stores as recently as July 1, our experience with user interfaces that are designed for none, catching up on the hype/hope/fading hope about self-driving cars, and finally, the only thing that can terrorize a company the size of Walmart – Jeff Bezos and Amazon.   Read more here.

Five recent Caregiving technology offerings from 2018. What newcomers have entered the market?  Besides ‘longevity market new media’ like Stria (former Next Avenue) that provided a splash of cold water for startups and investors in the older adult space.  Although there is little evidence that any investors are bullish about the general older adult market – despite AARP documentation and various books to the contrary, innovators continue to create new offerings to help older adults live better lives.  Here are five recent and soon-launching offerings to help – content is from the websites of the firms or articles about them. Read more here.

Speaking Up About Health and Wellness. Voice First is changing health and wellness offerings today – and it is just the beginning. Already the predicted capability to speak a request or instruction without having to type or tap on a device – known as Voice First – has transformed how we interact with technology. If we can speak a command to play music, control the lights, or open the shades benefits accrue to the elderly who live alone. This technology can help those who are blind or have macular degeneration, and it can help those with disabilities. AARP and Optum have initiated pilots to determine if this technology can help mitigate social isolation and improve health outcomes for the elderly. And note experiments and pilots for applying Voice First technologies for health and wellness. Read more here.

With fewer caregivers, what’s the (tech-enabled) plan?  You saw the headline – America is running out of family caregivers.  The numbers are daunting.  Says Ken Dychwald in the WSJ article:  “We’re going to have to look to nontraditional care,” says Ken Dychtwald, CEO of Age Wave, a consulting firm.  "Older adults, he says, may have to take in boarders, who can help with shopping and repairs, or rely more on monitoring devices and delivery services.”  This latest article was based on a recent study (part of a series) from Merrill Lynch and Age Wave.  But is the issue low growth in potential family caregivers?  Or is the real issue the low growth of population in the appropriate age range (45-64) of people to provide care to people who are aged 80+? Read more here.

Are seniors different from other people? Google discovers seniors (sort of) and thus a market is maybe born. There was a breathlessness to the CNBC article on July 23, 2018 – Google is mulling older adult applications for its Nest product line – particularly in senior housing settings, hopefully at less cost per installation than its website pricing.  And gee whiz, one of the uses is pathway lighting to find the bathroom – presumably replacing motion-sensing night lights for $7.97 from Walmart. Up next, predicting life-threatening falls, perhaps as an alternative to Philips CareSage or BioSensics Frailty Meter, for example.  Google execs qualified our enthusiasm, per the article: "The ideas are only in the discussion stage and may not find their way into shipping products." Since his role at Google is to do 'something interesting' – perhaps this may not turn out to be. Read more here.

category tags: 

Voice First/AI technology, Boomer-Senior Tech Business

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/six-tech-aging-and-health-blog-posts-july-2018