December 2016

Safety matters -- both to older adults and their loved ones.  For those who worry about the elderly, home safety monitoring technology and personal emergency response offerings provide a degree of reassurance -- following the entry of MobileHelp as one of the first, most of the viable Personal Emergency Response System (PERS) vendors in the market today have a mobile device, enabling the older adult to leave the home, walk the dog, and wear a device while on trips. In addition, automatically-generated check-in technology can provide another degree of comfort for caregiving families and professional providers. During 2016, a number of new variants of safety-related introductions were made, including, but not limited to the following launches: 

We buy many insurances – just in case.  Car, homeowners, apartment, flood, personal liability – all are hedges against the unknown and unwanted.  Seeing a business opportunity, insurers created a long-term care insurance market for a benefit the customer might not need for another 25 years. We can buy a service contract to cover repairs of our appliances.  Yet so it continues that when we purchase technology, carrier, or software services, the offering changes ever more quickly -- and our technology becomes obsolete. So we toss the products (and services) into the soon-forgotten gadget graveyard with 135 million mobile phones discarded in 2010 alone -- the last date for which there are EPA statistics.