2009-19 Market of Technology for Older Adults -- All change, all the time

The more things change...This is the tenth anniversary of the launch of this Market Overview of technology for ‘Aging in Place’, to be published in March 2019 – the category of offerings that help enable older adults to remain longer in their home of choice. The launch of that first report was timed in conjunction with the What’s Next Boomer Business Summit of 2009 and offered a chance to speak publicly about a market category that had been largely ignored by tech industry analysts.  As a long-time Forrester analyst, this seemed odd, not unlike the ‘tree falling in the forest’ cliché – if there is no market overview of tech categories, how do vendors position themselves in the market? 

What a difference a decade makes. In 2009, there were specialized email services that converted an online message into paper form; WiFi in seniors’ homes or senior living residences was rare; the mobile PERS offerings were just a concept; the iPad had not been announced; Digital Health was three years away; and Voice First offerings would not appear for another five years. AARP’s Healthy@Home had just been published, noting the willingness to use technology in the home, even though little had been invented or marketed yet. In 2009, the market was forecast to be $20 billion by 2020. 

All of that has changed by 2019. As the oldest Baby Boomer turns 73 this year, vendor interest in tech for older adults reaches all the way from (A) Apple to (Z) Zanthion.  At least half of adults age 65+ have broadband connections in their homes – and insurance incentives are pushing more tech-enabled health care offerings into the home. Meanwhile, seniors will face a worsening shortage of workers to provide care in the home -- even as the majority of seniors will want to stay there versus move to senior living (which will face the same labor shortage). Yet the new technology landscape, however, is not just about an aging demographic – it is about changing technology trends that emphasize use of standard hardware platforms, designed for all, customized through a wealth of software for special purposes and specific market segments, incorporating a plethora of ever-changing devices and ever-more-mystifying complexity. In 2019, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has sized the 'active aging' technology market as reaching $29.8 billion by 2022 -- the year the oldest baby boomer turns 76. Expect tech adoption for the 75+ age range to begin to ratchet up, right along with lengthening age 65+ life expectancy.  

From senior-only tech to senior-aware marketing. While there are still specialty tech offerings for older adults (i.e. PERS, now 30% mobile), a growing percentage of seniors are using general commercial offerings, from smart phones to smart speakers to smart watches with emergency buttons. Apps for caregiving have mostly come and gone. Tapping and typing, required in 2009, is augmented and sometimes replaced by speaking. Virtual reality has opened whole worlds, literally, for senior living residents. Sensors continue to shrink, doorbells have acquired brains, health-smart wearables are helping seniors better manage chronic conditions.  The insurance and technology markets are united, so to speak, in the mission of helping older adults stay out of the dwindling number of hospitals, expecting telehealh/virtual care to be an enabler. Services are emerging, like BestBuy's Assured Living, to help families and older adults make the most sense of the ever-expanding tangle of tech in their home.  Maybe 2019 will begin a decade of technology streamlining, integration, and simplification. But don't bet on it.

 

[NOTE: If you receive this blog post through email, please click on the website Aging in Place Technology Watch to see news articles, trend reports, press releases, and more].

 

category tags: 

Boomer-Senior Tech Business, aging in place, IoT and home monitoring, Voice Assistants/Smart Speakers, mHealth-Digital Health-Telehealth-Voice Health

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/2009-19-market-technology-older-adults-all-change-all-time

Whatever Happened to Tech-Enabled Home Care?

So much VC money, so little resulting change. Past venture capital investment in home care technology boggles the mind. It seems only yesterday that Tech-Enabled Home Care was published – with that wonderful Forbes graphic "Why VCs Care More About Home Care."  The article noted the $200 million invested just in 2016 -- with big money that year putting $60M into ClearCare, $46 million into Care.com and $42 million into Honor as next in line.  The VCs cared, all right – if that money was an indicator. But were they smart? Did they change the dynamics of the home care industry? With smaller investment that year, it's good to see that Envoy (concierge service for independent living), Kindly Care (home care agency), Caremerge (home care platform), and Seniorlink (care coordination) are all in their same businesses from 2016 – and others from the period like Envoy and CareLinx received additional investment and moved forward. What happened to the other Forbes rock stars? 

Some went down and others, like Care.com, gained more, perhaps dubious, investment. HomeHero ($23 million, direct-to-consumer) quickly shut down in 2017,  "more bluster than disrupter" – including a link to founder Kyle Hill’s whiny story of disillusionment that made him 'hang up his cape.'  Perhaps he was wise, since his cohorts from that period swallowed up much more money. Consider Care.com – total funding through its 2016 IPO of $156 million (mostly direct-to-consumer) – with Alphabet/Google as of 2016 as the last round and largest shareholder of the company. Care.com is a home-related services marketplace (babysitters, pet sitters, elder care) – but was that much investment required?  And given recent noisy issues about weak background checks, was it smart – and of what benefit will this firm be to Google?

Hometeam. Founded by Josh Bruno in 2014 so that 'all caregivers are visible, recognized, and empowered,' the company raised a total of $43.5 million over three rounds. This was a direct-to-consumer offering matching caregivers with those looking for them, primarily in the greater New York/New Jersey area. However, in April of 2018, top executives stepped down, including the new president who had only been on board 5 months. The firm pivoted to a B2B services for dual-eligible (Medicare, Medicaid) model in its same region. So was that last $27.5 million sensible for the series B group that coughed it up in 2016, supposedly to enable "expansion into multiple new regions" or was it extraordinary -- as one writer politely noted at the time?

And at $115 million, consider Honor, the biggest investment puzzlement of all.  Honor (JoinHonor.com) was also the product of enthusiastic investment by a VC. The company was founded by Seth Sternberg, previously the seller of social media firm, Meebo, to Google for $100 million in 2012 (and killed a year later in favor of now-dead Google+).  So what was the original plan for Honor?  THe description noted better screening of caregivers in its online marketplace, hiring them, paying them as much as $17/hour, perhaps for brief stints of an hour or two here. Then along came another $42 million to deliver the service to more people during that overheated funding year of 2016. Finally, in a no-surprise  'pivot' last year, it raised another $50 million to become a technology partner for home care agencies, a tech company after all. Was all that money from VCs well-spent or was that $115 million also 'extraordinary?'

Meanwhile, back over at the 'traditional' and booming home care franchise market.  During the height of the 2016 bubble, traditional home care companies were surprisingly unfazed by the swirl of money surrounding the unicorns. Several privately predicted that it was a lot of sound and fury, signifying not much. They went about growing their franchise businesses to the levels that they are today, led by Home Instead ($1.58 billion globally in 1300 locations), Interim Health Care (home care and hospice), and Visiting Angels, but including a long list of home care agencies that were in business years before 2016. The biggest risk to this industry will be labor shortages – and the pressure to raise wages to compete for workers with firms like Amazon and Walmart – where the jobs are less demanding. But as for the $200 million of VC investment in home care startups, they were right to pay little attention.

category tags: 

Home Care, tech-enabled home care

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/whatever-happened-tech-enabled-home-care

Five technology offerings from HIMSS 2019

HIMSS 2019 is where 40,000 health IT enthusiasts engage.   Per their own by-the-numbers charts, you see a picture of the scale of it -- more than 40,000 attendees wanted to be in Orlando, braving weather-related travel obstacles, obtain any required continuing education units – and ideally see as much as possible of the 1300 vendor exhibits. Remembering that adults 65+ are major consumers of healthcare. Here are five of these offerings from 2019 HIMSS, viewed with the lens of caregiving and older adults. 

Aiva. ​Aiva uses Google Home, Amazon Echo and other smart speakers to not only engage and empower patients and seniors, but also to connect them more closely to their caregivers. The voice OS is built on a suite of enterprise applications -- a mobile app for caregivers to manage help requests, a dashboard for performance reporting, and a backend for controlling the voice assistants’ settings and their interaction with other IoT smart devices like TVs, lights and thermostats. Learn more at AivaHealth.

Beyond Verbal. Beyond Verbal is developing voice-enabled AI solutions to create proprietary vocal biomarkers for personalized healthcare screening and continuous remote monitoring of health and emotions. We are now having access to an extensive database of over 150K patient records with over 1 Million anonymized voice recordings. Our internal database has grown to include more than tens of thousands of labeled patient records, correlated with their medical records. Learn more at BeyondVerbal.

CarePassport.  Patients benefit from a single medical app to support them throughout their medical journey. Find clinics and hospitals nearby your location, request and manage appointments, view your care providers’ contact information, and communicate with them via secure messaging. Patients can view their medical records and securely share with their healthcare providers. CarePassport allows patients to receive educational materials related to their care, authorize family members to access their information through secure proxy settings, and use navigation maps to drive to their appointments or arrange rides via Uber. Learn more at CarePassport.

EchoCare. EchoCare Technologies has a radar-based, non-wearable, elderly-care, home monitoring system that automatically alerts safety and emergency situations. The ECHO system is a connected, machine-learning, Advanced-PERS (Personal Emergency Response System) that includes a disruptive fall detector with very low false alarm. In addition to unprecedented fall detection capabilities, the ECHO system detects and alerts on other emergency situations, such as sleep apnea, hyperventilation, abnormal situations, and change from elderly daily routines. Learn more at EchoCare.

GetWellNetwork. The company’s GetWell Loop™ enables care teams to engage all patients before and after admission through automated daily check-ins. By sending the right information at the right time, GetWell Loop identifies those patients that need help in real-time, allowing care teams to reach more patients and proactively intervene before costs and complications escalate. Lear more at GetWellNetwork.

category tags: 

healthcare, mHealth-Digital Health-Telehealth-Voice Health, digital health

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/five-technology-offerings-himss-2019

InnovAge LIFE in Action

InnovAge LIFE, known nationally as the Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), can help by providing healthcare and social services to seniors - without having them move to a nursing facility.

from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6jEoeMNk9Y

Six Health and Aging Technology Blog Posts from January, 2019

January 2019 was a l-o-o-o-n-g month.  And not the least because of travel to California, Nevada, Tennessee, and a hop through Atlanta.  Most because it was difficult to absorb and rationalize so much tech news, hype, booths and convention center halls at the Digital Health Summit at CES 2019 – where a step counter status update may have been the most satisfying experience of all at the end of the day. Chattanooga was a visit to the Alexa World Fair, where the song ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ acquired new meaning – clearly the Voice First landscape, well-tracked by Voicebot.AI and Bret Kinsella, is heating up.  Here are the six blog posts to kick off the new year in January 2019:

2018-2019 look back and ahead at tech buzz, hope, and hype. Who can resist reflection when a year ends and 2019 begins? So much racket, so much of it driven by writers desperate for something to write about – and we’re not talking about the news. Lots of  negative tech energy in 2018, including healthcare data breaches, Facebook’s loss of trust, ditto with Google and its much discussed anti-competitive positioning in search. The visibility of Facebook management issues and Google competitive quagmire may actually be good for consumers.  So what was interesting in 2018 that was great news, possibly intriguing or just plain worth noting prior to CES 2019, which will present a cornucopia (or maybe just a plethora) of new tech and tech news? [Warning, more blog posts about CES next week while there].  A few topics that stood out. Read more.

Ten Technology Offerings from CES 2019 – Beyond Gadgets. Bright Lights, thick smoke, constant walking and avoidance maneuvers.  After taking a year or two off, returning to CES is a chore and a revelation – it clearly is the major event for new technology announcements. Gadgets, yes, too many smart wearables, including underwear, too many near misses of being run over by gangs of oblivious young guys staring at their phones. If there was a key trend in all of this racket, Sleep has become a tech obsession, the uptake of Digital Health is almost here, new variants of companions and assistants were pervasive, including Google Assistant inside everything and Amazon voice devices everywhere. Read more.

Ten More Technology Offerings from CES 2019 -- Beyond Gadgets. CES 2019 – Gone but certainly not forgotten. Multiple blog posts and articles have surfaced since CES 2019 – including some offerings that should be recapped here. No doubt they would have been viewed in person with more time and better tennis shoes at the Sands Convention Center. There was ANOTHER convention center (LVCC) and various hotel events that remained sight unseen. The important insight about CES is that while some offerings were played in a previous year, the networking opportunity for innovators was too good to miss and so many returned.  Read more.

Consider: Aging in a Virtual World. Once upon a time, in a language far, far away…We used terms like long distance, remote, and telepresence to describe services and experiences that were taking place somewhere else. We were guided on how to cope with these remote processes where we were not present to manage or experience. And for the care recipients being managed, they were unable to communicate problems in their on-site, 'real' experience. Consider dementia care and the still-startling lack of cameras in these settings – despite family willingness to pay. These limitations seem so yesterday.  Even a telepresence player like Beam threw in the towel and refers to the world it now navigates as ‘virtual.’   Let's take a longer look into this virtual world as it relates to care of older adults and consider such offerings. Read more.

Technology Tool Tarnish – Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn. Facebook is the company we increasingly love to hate – but boomers still ‘like’ it. So much negative press, well deserved, about Facebook lately, including the lawsuit about knowingly duping children playing games. Then there was the Pew Research estimated number of deleted accounts (mostly young people) and no small deal, a big security breach.  Clearly this is a company with management issues – and someday will either fail (unlikely), be broken up, or be regulated, even in the US, which has for some unknown reason done nothing to date, unlike privacy actions taken in Europe.   According to eMarketer, though, baby boomers are still big users – of the 76.4 million of them, 31.9 million are using Facebook. Read more.

2019: What Technology Matters for Older Adults. In 2018, technology utilization grew – so did frustrations.  While Internet and social media technology use has plateaued over all age ranges, Facebook still has captured only 41% of the 65+.  Pew’s data showed that smartphone ownership still has not overtaken cellphones among the 65+.   In early 2019, AARP Research published a technology survey taken in 2018 which showed ownership of smartphones growing to 65% of the 65+.  However, that same survey revealed low trust in online safety, and generally low trust in institutions to keep their personal data safe, a justified worry, given the number of data breaches that occurred during 2018. Read more.

[NOTE: If you are reading this as an email, you are welcome to click directly on the website Aging in Place Technology Watch where other useful trend information is located.]

category tags: 

Voice First/AI technology, mHealth-Digital Health-Telehealth-Voice Health, CES 2019

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/six-health-and-aging-technology-blog-posts-january-2019