Mobile PERS

In home and out and about – new and not quite here offerings.  The top of the list alphabetically is the not-yet-here and pricey Amazon Echo Show.  Is this a ground-breaking innovation? Or is it an always-watching irritant set to ‘drop-in mode’ which automatically will accept a video call after 10 seconds? On the positive side -- start chatting with an aging parent who lacks or hates PC/Macs, tablets, or smartphones.  Consider the potentially negative response: an intrusive person (your loving relative) sneaks up on your screen, ready to converse when you least expect it. How creepy-Skype-y is it?  Here are the five:

So you want to launch a boomer/senior, home health tech product or caregiving marketplace, or caregiver advisory service.  As your new company get ready to travel into battle later this spring to a plethora of lively pitches, 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. First read the AARP-sponsored Challenging Innovators research report. Then look over this updated checklist that continues to hold true – with a few links that are merely examples:

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: 

Innovation from companies that have been there, done that.  It's intriguing to observe companies that have been in business for a while.  Sometimes there is a redirect into a new space or channel (see Philips and its direct-to-consumer approach) and sometimes innovation arrives that may augment an existing portfolio.  The market of technology and services for older adults continues to expand (see a near-hysterical Huffington Post article.)  So flipping around the cliché that 90% of all startup companies fail, wonder if there is another one -- 90% of all existing tech-related companies launch a tech or a service targeting seniors and caregivers within the next 5 years?  Here are five offerings - all text is from the company sites or press releases.