It was one of the worst and the best of times for innovation and older adults.  It was a year, early on, in which tech-enabled home care appeared to resonate with investors. But traditional home care companies stuck to their knitting, watching the Home Hero shutdown in the midst of an ever-more-startling shortage of prospective workers.  It was the oddest of times, with the $80 billion hype of self-driving cars partly focused on the transit needs of older adults. And it was the best of times – as 2017 was the year of Voice First technology lift-off – as Amazon’s Echo forced the hand of Google’s Home. Ultimately seniors will benefit from technology that fits both their interest and needs -- see the Market Overview update from early in the year. Here are the top blog posts from 2017:

So you want to launch a boomer/senior, home health tech product, caregiving marketplace, or caregiver advisory service.   Or other. Your new company gets ready to travel into battle for west coast networking, or you're back from Orlando or Boston, consider this guidance, now that cards have been exchanged and follow-up emails sent. Soon your new or existing company will officially launch a new product or service, or a much-anticipated offering will finally ship. You read AARP and Pew survey research reports, used a magnifying glass to see the vendors identified in Caregiving Innovation Frontiers. Now look over this November 2017 updated checklist. Are you ready?

Maybe Best Buy has an idea worth copying from Amazon. In 2015, Amazon introduced Amazon Home Services, which fairly recently added tech services, including sending a local tech professional to your home. The work might be setting up a router; connections for 4 devices; password protection; and use and troubleshooting instructions. Recently, Best Buy launched Assured Living, a service to help long-distance adult children monitor older family members’ well-being, including setting them up with smart home technologies (costing as much as $1000 for all of them), possibly some of the list is in the ‘official’ definition. Oh yeah, and there is a service charge of $1/day.

Aging in America – hosting innovators and technologists for helping older adults.  The conference seesaws between west coasts (San Francisco 2018) and the windy city of Chicago, where it was this year – offering up a full program of sessions across the week of March 20-24. Bookending this conference, which offers Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for social service professionals, was What's Next Boomer Summit and the Aging 2.0 Chicago Pitch Event.  The Pitch winner was i65, a tool to help professionals provide guidance on Medicare. That event also included TeleCalm – an intriguing telephone service to help block unwanted calls, including a tool for caregivers to create a trusted list of callers.