Remote monitoring

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:

CES 2017 – an overwhelming 'tech-o-rama' that defies categorization.  So do not expect insight here about why, where, or what was intriguing to journalists and geeks, including the Wall Street Journal.  There will be no discussion of how Vegas may be different in a year where the show, which attracted 175,000, ended on a Sunday. [Rant on] And the Silver Summit at CES is long gone, first replaced by Lifelong Tech in 2015 and then fully absorbed into the Digital Health Summit last year and this year. And there will be no discussion here about why, oh why, do all of the demonstration videos of nearly everything have to limit the viewer imagination to the young people being shown? [Rant off] Okay, there is no existing aggregator source for tech that could be useful to older adults -- spanning multiple categories -- nor to caregivers who care for them, either professional or family. Note that some media articles grouped items: a)  tech related to hearing loss, b) tech to assist people with disabilities, and c) an Accessibility Marketplace.  In addition to those offerings, here are five that so far caught my eye -- drawn from various sources:

At an event this week with that title – it makes you wonder. What will living to 100 be like in 40 years?  In 2014, there were 72,197 Americans aged 100 or older, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  That number is up 44% since 2000, so that is presumably the good news. Moving forward, the projection is for an even more impressive number – 603,971 anticipated by 2060. The bad news?  The cause of death from Alzheimer’s disease among centenarians has also increased by 119% since 2000.

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: