Meet or hear Laurie in one of the following:

Washington DC March 23.

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November 2014

Ten Tips -- 2014 Year-End Guide for Launching a Product or Service

So you want to launch a boomer/senior, home health tech product or service.  As your new company gets ready to travel into battle at mHealth, CES, and all those 2015 launch events to-be-named-later, it is time to for you to revisit this guidance. Perhaps some time soon, your new or existing company will officially launch a new product or service, or perhaps a long-awaited, over-described and much-anticipated offering will finally ship. Here is a checklist that continues to hold true – with a few links that are merely examples:

Configuring the baseline of activity for older adults

Less movement and non-movement matter.  The Washington Post ran an article recently about GreatCall's partnership with an AI company so that patterns and changes in behavior could be reported to family members from its wearable PERS device.  Of course, tracking and reporting about changes from baselines -- that's nothing new for sensor-based home monitoring systems.   But it is a surprisingly big deal in the PERS industry -- where even those who once supported pattern-detecting big ideas dropped them like a hot rock -- in favor of the transactional PERS world -- press the button and someone will come.   The most radical changes in that industry over five years, fall detection and GPS tracking, have still been transactional -- Mrs. Smith, we are responding, are you okay? -- versus, I'm Mrs. Smith's device, and based on her behavior changes, she is not okay.

While we were sleeping -- the kingdom of our data was lost

I quit Facebook and life, such as it was, went on.  I quit because its business tactics were becoming ever so more UnFriendly-like -- from experiments with the product of us to selling your browsing history to selling your facial profile to advertisers. Then over to tracking your TV-watching habits and listening to voices on your mobile device, Facebook will soon opt into your health information -- thus forcing more privacy Opt-Outs. So time without Facebook slowly passed, then the 14-day post-deletion period -- are you sure, sure, sure? You can still re-activate! -- that grace period came and quietly went. No one, myself included, noticed my disappearance on that day. I did not request my archive of 7+ years of posts, I did not write down a list of those 300 or so folks that I had 'friended' over the years, apparently an average number for all users, and I did not note the businesses that had requested that I Like them. Without a glance back, I left all those pictures of just-cooked or about-to-be-eaten meals, graduation pictures of people I no longer knew (and thus probably don't really Like all that much), timelines, new feeds, and even groups, including alumni of gone companies from my many gone jobs. But I am not the only one departing -- looks like some younger people are getting out too.

Five Recent Technology Introductions for Seniors

Independa Announced AnyTVCompanion.  "Independa's integrated CloudCare meets the needs of all individuals in the care ecosystem, from the resident, to the organization and professional caregivers, to personal caregivers. With customizable modules spanning all care and residential settings, from community engagement to social engagement to integrated monitoring, Independa offers unique features across the care continuum, from independent living at home or in a community, to continuing care at home, to assisted living, memory care, short-term rehabilitation and a nursing home. Residents effortlessly access the software through the most familiar and most used device in their lives, their TV -- the new AnyTV Companion, works with any HDMI-enabled TV currently in place." Learn more at Independa.com.

The fallacy of age as a predictor of future Digital Health adoption

Today's older adults will not get a 'check engine light for their body.' Investors in innovation worry when utilization of technology doesn't match hyper-hysterical investment pace.  So it is with Digital Health. Buried beneath broad and unclear definitions, how about that 'check engine light' metaphor -- reset it yourself, go ahead! Vague and hyper-funded, Digital Health, says Startup Health, received up to $5 billion investment just in 2014. Still there's bit of whining about startups starting but users not adopting. So what's the solution?  Don't critique investment decisions, bad product ideas and those dual dilemmas of doctor and patient disinterest.  See VC Tom Rodgers push the predicted adoption date out another 15-20 years and at the same time criticize the non-tech literacy of the old and sick of today. Says he: Digital Health will go mainstream when millennials are older and sicker.

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