fall prevention, fall detection

How retro: Bed sensors come into the mainstream.  These days, we seem to be really obsessed with tracking our sleep. Or rather, tech firms like Samsung want to track our sleep with their tech. SLEEPSense will give you a sleep score (Yay!) and even turn off the TV if you've fallen asleep while watching. That's why they invested in EarlySense, an Israeli company, and made an effort to learn ways to improve sleep quality. But this isn't really new:  tech trying to improve sleep has been around the wearables market for a while, along with white noise generators and the like. BamLabs, for example, was noted (or notable) at least four years ago with its bed sensor offering.

PERS devices and wearables – what will bring them together? Now that the Washington Post has declared that Apple and Google will solve our health problems, aren’t you relieved? Oh, you’re a bit concerned about your privacy, the fact that all of your outside-of-Facebook web searches are by default accessible to Facebook – that you have to opt out on a completely separate website in order to terminate tracking of this activity?  As you wander around Google, Yahoo or through iTunes, your searches about health topics, those are all now relevant for advertisers as provided by Facebook!  And extra-special, what do you think about the fact that Apple lobbied away any need for FDA approval for anything health-related? Feeling safely healthy now?

First the good news -- life expectancy is up.  So as boomers cross the 65-year-marker at 8000 per day, 10,000 per day, or whatever, they just received some good news, for a change, from the CDC.  Life expectancy has inched up. A woman who is 65 today can expect to live an average of 21 more years (to age 86), and a man at 65 has an average life expectancy of 18 more years (to age 83). Note that these are averages and that the averages include those with chronic diseases. That average includes the nearly 26% likelihood of diabetes (diagnosed and undiagnosed) -- and that diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the US  and that heart disease is the number one cause of death among women and ditto for men.  Thus life expectancy outside of those conditions is most certainly far longer.