Telehealth-RPM-Virtual Visits-Voice Health

Design improvements that benefit all will benefit older adults and caregivers. Unlike niche hardware and software for seniors, basic Voice First platforms and software will change rapidly and without disruption for users – accompanied by a ‘What’s New’ weekly email and a few suggestions on new tricks to try – but the changes behind the front-facing features will make the most difference. With the 2018 lens to guide the market today, here are a few ways the user experience and thus the ecosystem should have ratcheted upwards:

Why should home care agencies boost awareness of remote monitoring? Both types of monitoring are increasingly likely to be found by home care professionals entering a new care recipient’s home.  The objective of these remote monitoring technologies is to help healthcare teams, care workers and/or families understand if any issues are occurring inside the home when they cannot be there in person.  Patients with chronic diseases or those who are discharged from hospitals may benefit from the use of RPM technology to monitor significant chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension or congestive heart failure, and especially to avoid a recurrence of an issue that would require readmission. 

Voice technology in 2022 – living up to hope and hype? By 2018, it seemed possible that Voice First technology (and its associated AI software) could transform the technology user experience for older adults (see report: The Future of Voice First Technology and Older Adults 2018). Fairly new at the time, a few senior living organizations embraced it for its home automation potential, possibility of concierge services -- turn on the lights! Raise the blinds! Book me on the afternoon trip!. The generally accepted view was that this technology was going to be “Easy, Cheap, Useful, Smart, and Connected (home automation that just works).” Amazon’s Alexa service ran on multiple variants of cheap hardware. Like Apple’s Siri, the software’s understanding of requests was relatively weak (compared to Google Assistant, which emerged in 2018 on Android and iOS).

Older adults benefit from voice-AI enabled innovation and deployment. And it looks like they will continue to benefit in 2022 and beyond. For one thing, at least two-thirds of older adults (age 70+) own smartphones, the 65+ population prefers Alexa among voice assistants, one-third of Americans have smart speakers. Researchers want to understand how best to create a voice assistant. Amazon’s Alexa Together wants to help monitor falls of older adults in senior living. Advice to seniors seeks to help older adults understand how to benefit from voice while aging in place. In addition, multiple senior living organizations have or are now publicizing their initiatives (information is from the publicly available material):

AI – it’s everywhere, including tech for older adults. So what is AI? Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI can use machine learning based on large data sets, and has a number of well-known applications, including recommendations from Netflix, Siri and Alexa, bots and robo-advisors. AI plays an increasing role in healthcare, including the growing use of chatbot tools used by patients. In addition, there are multiple examples of use in the care of older adults. In some cases, these are the result of partnerships, in others from product development. Here are five recent examples leveraging AI, with all information coming from vendor announcements and websites: