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

Marketing technology – 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.

So one must ask -- has Amazon discovered seniors – sort of, but not overtly.  Surely that would turn into a reason why Google (Nest or otherwise) would engage.  People seem to think there is a list of Alexa skills and commands that are or could be useful.  And in fact, a search on the Amazon site turns up many – but as for Amazon itself – well it is as stealth in intent as Google, only more so.  Amazon may – or may not – collaborate with AARP on offerings for seniors.  AARP has demonstrated its enthusiasm by creating an AARP Alexa ‘flash briefing’ skill that is ‘curated for the ‘50-plus crowd.’ Pause to contemplate a ‘crowd’ of 107.8 million (one-third of the US population) and what they may have in common with each other. Okay, never mind.  

As for everyone else – people, service providers, and vendors get the utility. With Apple, a search for ‘elderly’ (turns up zip) and ‘seniors’ brings up the executive team. Their products are for ‘all’ people, no individual age-based market segments appear to matter. However, Apple has a robust Accessibilities feature list – though the featured photos are mostly of younger people.  Which brings up an interesting point about market awareness, targeting, and fear of targeting.  Today there are nearly 50 million people aged 65+ in the US, and one in five Americans will be at least that age in twelve short years.  So what year is the right year for Google to be “shipping products” to benefit them? Or for Amazon to cultivate its own offerings and messaging and not its 2014 icky and short-lived one-stop shopping for defibrillators and adult diapers?

Are seniors different from other people?  There are differences for sure – benefits eligibility and national age-based programs: age  62+ for Social Security, 65+ for Medicare, and age 50+ eligibility for AARP discounts.  And also health statistics do not lie.  Half of the aged 75+ population has a ‘disabling’ hearing loss – no doubt contributing to social isolation and poorer health, not to mention the 5+ million of the elderly living with Alzheimer’s and/or dementia.  At the same time, all seniors can benefit from consumer technology advancement, particularly Voice First, which enables avoidance of squint-tap-and-touch and replaces that glass-based UI with everyone’s best skill – talking. Was that accidental innovation that benefits older adults? Maybe so (Amazon and Google aren’t saying) and if so, let there be more of these.

category tags: 

Boomer-Senior Tech Business, Aging, smart home, Voice First/AI technology

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/marketing-technology-are-seniors-different-other-people

With Fewer Family 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+?

What is the quantified care gap -- now and in the future? This age-specific gap was quantified in 2013 by AARP (available caregivers in the population, or the caregiver support ratio, from 7:1 down to 3:1 by 2050). Then it was more precisely translated into near-term implications in specific geographies published that same year (think Palm Beach and Sarasota County, Ocean County, NJ, and Barnstable, MA). And finally, factoring in family caregivers and population age range, what about paid caregivers – and what is that gap?  The Age Wave study, as do many journalists, combines home care (non-skilled, or ‘companion’) with home health care (higher level of training and certification and refers to all as 'home health care.'  

For such an innovative society, so far there are no good ideas. Think about the innovation -- the remarkable cleverness that emerges when America appears to run out of any resource. Consider doctors, especially in rural areas, and the investment in digital health, including remote diagnostics and consultations with specialists. Think about the growth in kiosks and self-service across multiple categories.  Yet in personal care delivery -- whether in senior living, home care, home healthcare – the only idea, grasped like an out-of-reach straw, has been an in-home robot. Focus on socialization has meant that even those that made it most of the way into the market, like Jibo, spent $73 million and collapsed.  Was socialization the right caregiving problem to solve? Or did Amazon (and Google) solve that with its line of Echo devices, reminders, notifications, and drop-in calls?  And as for caregiving robots? Well, it’s amazing, but there is literally nothing near term.

What is being attempted for in-home care?   Multiple robotics initiatives involving personal care have all failed.  AARP funded a report, Caregiving Innovation Frontiers, in 2016, but has not doubled back to see what happened to all of the great ideas there. Family caregivers benefit from access to tools within software platforms (offered through provider organizations), but themselves are unlikely to buy them. Tech-enabled home care was a venture capital bust -- but imagine, turning to one failure and giving them more money to manage tech for the rest. In late 2017, AARP and others launched the Care Institute with a its own YAWN -- Yet Another Worrisome Number -- that there will be more than 27 million people requiring paid care by 2050. They offer an initiative to train and grow the care workforce (combining childcare, post-acute care, and elder care, not at all similar, unfortunately).  It seems that if a technology cannot get into the market to deliver physical care, maybe now it’s really time to ramp up the worker population, giving new meaning to the cliche "a day late and a dollar short." 

category tags: 

Family caregivers, Home Care, tech-enabled home care, home health care

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/fewer-family-caregivers-what-s-tech-enabled-plan

Voice First: Speaking Up about Health and Wellness

Voice First is changing health and wellness offerings today. 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 can accrue to the elderly living alone, to individuals who are blind or have macular degeneration, and those with disabilities. And AARP and Optum have initiated pilots to determine if this technology can help mitigate social isolation among the elderly and improve health outcomes. But there are experiments and pilots for using Voice First technologies for health and wellness applications. So what’s intriguing?

Answers to some questions are obvious -- or obviously missing.  Health tech and service providers want to speak – at least a little.  Alexa has the answer to ‘Where’s the Nearest Hospital” but sends you to WebMD for how to treat a sunburn. Consumer healthcare literacy concerns (“what’s a formulary?”) led insurer Cigna in March 2018 to launch Answers by Cigna.  Need first aid guidance about dealing with a fever? There’s Mayo Clinic First Aid Skill.  Ask questions to Google Assistant -- much like Apple’s Siri, shows both the promise and weakness of current offerings. The dilemma - to provide an answer to a question that exceeds (Google’s) 29-word brevity for the software’s spoken response. One of the critiques of WebMD’s Alexa skill – it didn’t understand drug names.

Healthcare systems offer voice-enabled interfaces – as experiments.  KidsMD, launched in 2016, has been a pioneer in use of Voice First health offerings – offering ‘trusted pediatric content.’ For other providers, asking where the nearest urgent care facility is – especially if you’re out of town – may make some sense. But see Independent Health’s Alexa skill – does asking about your deductible make any sense?  Your particular cost to visit an ER? As some have said repeatedly, Voice First does not mean Voice only – and a 29-word response, well, for some questions, the less said, the better.

Home health care – perhaps the best fit for Voice First.   Like Children’s hospital, Libertana Home Health Care saw the potential and launched a home health solution with Orbita in 2017 – with reminders about schedules, medications, and access to caregivers. LifePod recently announced a partnership with Commonwealth Care Alliance to provide home health support for medication adherence and care plans. And then there’s Amazon -- with a team focused on health and wellness – creating interest and some have concern about a voice home hub – though not yet HIPAA compliant.  But is there anyone who thinks that Amazon (or Google or even Apple) won’t overcome current barriers?

category tags: 

Voice First/AI technology, home health care, mHealth-Digital Health-Telehealth, digital health

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/voice-first-speaking-about-health-and-wellness