Aging and Health Technology Watch

2019 Technology Market Overview is online this week. When assembling the 2019 tenth anniversary version, it was apparent that this year reflects change -- in the supply-demand balance in the overbuilt senior housing market, in policy changes driving health care services into the home, in market forecasts, and in the mix of vendors who serve the market.   It's in many ways a good-news/bad-news story.  Awareness is growing about an aging demographic, working longer and with longer life expectancy than previous generations.  At the same time, the technology market continues to expand in complexity, privacy and interoperability issues, while not effectively lowering cost of access or prices of useful devices -- and not necessarily boosting the availability of training on their benefits or use.  Here are four updated premises from the 2019 Market Overview of Technology for Older Adults:

The more things change...This is the tenth anniversary of the launch of this Market Overview of technology for ‘Aging in Place’, to be re-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? 

So much VC money, so little resulting change. Past venture capital investment in home care boggles the mind. It seems only yesterday that Tech-Enabled Home Care was published – including that wonderful Forbes graphic "Why VCs Care More About Home Care."  The Forbes 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 in their same businesses from 2016 – and others from the period like Envoy and CareLinx received additional investment and moved forward. What happened to other Forbes rock stars?  

HIMSS 2019 is where 43,000 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. 

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:

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.

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. Hopefully not trying to stay connected to teens – who are departing for other platforms like Snapchat, according to eMarketer, including Snapchat. On the positive side, Snapchat is not yet owned by Facebook – which will be combining Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp into a single platform by 2020.

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 as:

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.  Here are ten more, in alphabetical order:

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.