AgeTech

How tough is it to highlight tech innovation that could help older adults?  Pretty tough, judging by the accelerator pitch event winners at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference (etcetera) held this week in Austin. Even the hearing-loss tech winner, Sound Scouts, was pitched as a screening tool for children. And no joke, one of the winners, Laugh.ly, was a streaming app for stand-up comedy. Yay! So prior to next week's older-adult events in Chicago, here are new tech offerings drawn from those listed in the 2017 Technology Market Overview. Content is from their company websites:

Tech-enabling home care is one lens on future of care.  Venture capitalists listen carefully for trends fueled by talk in the media.  During the past several years, they heard plenty -- about the longevity economy and an investment-related network, digital health watchers like Rock Health and Startup Health 'moonshots', and all things boomer and their tech interest about the future. So they saw home care as a growth opportunity.  Buried in and mostly around the wave of investment and media interest in boomers (oldest age now is 71), the tech industry also noodled a bit more about the over-hyped Internet of Things, emerging voice recognition technologies, and technology adoption trends (everybody except for those aged 75+).

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:

From the universities and their affiliates – research about older adults.  Since this website was launched in 2008, periodic looks at who is doing what in the area of research on aging have repeatedly revealed little in the way of commercialization determination or practicality of offerings.  But funding is found – and several of these programs seem driven to reward innovation that can be commercialized – or they are funded by organizations that want and need results.  Here are four from a recent scan -- there are more, of course, and if you know one that is more robust, please send it along or provide a comment:

You may notice that it is the Christmas cheery season. [Rant on] Isn’t it great to see the sleigh-bell imagery, decoration excess, and TV Christmas-caroling crowds? Observe all the promotion, advertising and shopping discounts for must-have stuff. One guesses that Christmas must matter to self-identifying Christians, now only 75% of the US population, down from 80% in 2006. Yet the Christmas season is not about religion. It is a platform – a springboard for irrational spending, financial hangovers, 30% of annual retail sales, and the result -- goods that the recipient doesn’t want, need and can’t store – and that the giver can’t afford.