Remote monitoring

Seriously – are people aging? Rant on. Yesterday's WSJ article on technology was so Groundhog Day. But it must have shocked the Wall Street Journal reader – 72 million Americans will be 65 and older by 2030!  Well, actually, those are the Wall Street Journal readers: average age of 57 today – who will be 73 by 2030. So we’re not talking about Grandma, sports fans. The excitement? Technologies for a concept called 'Aging in Place.'  Well, maybe it’s not all that new. Scientists at universities – where else – are 'sparked on a quest' to research technologies to help people get help in their homes if they fall, since  it turns out that 1 in 3 seniors age 65 fall each year.  Actually, when it comes to falling and injury like hip fracture, it’s those WSJ readers who will be over the age of 75 by 2030 who will be at risk of falling. They want alternatives to 'wearable alarms' and web cameras – which, according to the article, are so…yesterday.  The 'new' technology incorporates – get ready – radar (Villanova research), motion sensors, and cameras. Ah, but really, it looks like they were all around, yesterday.

Sensor-based home monitoring is a maturing market.  A long time ago (2008) when this website was first launched, the benefits and difficulties of getting home-monitoring technology deployed were discussed. Perhaps families were ignorant about the technology, didn’t want to interfere or could not tell their aging parents what to do. Many observed that lack of knowledge about home monitoring solutions was the number one problem. Or maybe the senior's privacy concern was the problem. Or maybe complexity of installation and the need for an installer was the problem?  Searching the topic of 'home monitoring' on this site reveals a long list of companies launching, announcing, updating, partnering with providers, dealers, insurers -- as well as comments about barriers to adoption.

Not made in the USA. Over the years, Google alerts have both helped find technologies that would be useful to older adults -- and because this site has focused largely on US companies and initiatives, those same alerts sometimes seem to be all about happenings in upstate New York or new initiatives in New Jersey. So here is an attempt to start a conversation about great ideas for technology innovations from outside the US that can be helpful to seniors.  Emphasis is 'start' -- and additions are welcome.

The start of a new year -- it extends past CES!  Let's remind ourselves -- press releases matter. As you know by now, becoming quiet about a firm's products and offerings is bad business practice – silence is assumed to be a bad sign – and the aging dates of content on websites is even worse. That’s because the technology market waits for no man – or woman. And to their PR credit, tech companies get that. So in the past few months new versions and offerings of technology solutions have been swept up in press releases on this site – perhaps missed by readers, so here they are, extracted into a single blog post. As has been the case previously, all of the text is extracted from the announcements by the technology firms themselves.