The aging population has significant implications. Consider a few assumptions: Average life expectancy at 65 is mid-80’s, though many will live into their 90s. Older adults want to remain in their home as long as possible. A quarter of men aged 75+ and 43% of women live alone. Reports indicate that 46% have a disability. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that as many as half will need some kind of care assistance in their home at some point. It is also likely that most people will not be able to afford for 24x7 home care. But even if they could afford it, there is a severe home care worker shortage that is likely to worsen over the coming years as baby boomers enter their 80s.
Maybe it is time to get serious about the role of technology in care. So what about a combination of in-person care in the home and remote monitoring (health and motion)? Of course this has been around for years – but as a market it has mostly proceeded as point solutions here and there, rarely a unified suite that could accommodate change in an individual over time. Even in the assisted living market, there have been few end-to-end suite offerings – the recent $100M Series B funding of Inspiren, a solution provider for assisted living, perhaps signals a new trend of unified offerings. Could such a concept apply to home care as well? Consider the observations of Seth Sternberg about the need for tech-enabled home care to support the aging population. He notes that 24x7 in-person care is out of reach for most people: "The way you can solve that is by taking some of the human portion out and replacing that with device portion."
AI will enable combination of services in the home care market. Unified offerings that span multiple dimensions of in-home care do not require $100M to coalesce into suites. Consider the number of players in the Hospital at Home Market where a business opportunity that emerged during Covid had staying power – because that is where patients preferred to be. Looking at the possibilities for AI in home care, the time savings alone from AI-enabled note taking and staffing assistance are increasingly obvious to home care innovators. In the next few years, there will be a suite of AI-enabled offerings that deploy agents for specific home care tasks.
Hybrid care, in-person care combined with tech, will become the standard of care. If Honor/Home Instead sees a hybrid care future, the other home care companies will follow suit. The care recipient’s needs will never exactly match the hours of an in-home worker. Tech in the home that will pick up the assignment where the worker left off is an idea whose time has come. This tech will be voice-enabled and offer appropriate suggestions to the care recipient at the right time of day, in a conversational format, with a grasp of the response and a follow-up suggestion. Hybrid care will deploy AI agents that are assigned to specific tasks associated with the care recipient, at the right time, supported by the right data. It will happen. Likely soon.
