Remote monitoring

An age-friendly event in young Boston. Last week, LeadingAge returned to Boston after an absence of 23 years, now that the city has a convention center that can hold the 8500 attendees. Perhaps more remarkable, is the desire of the city to become age and dementia-friendly, as opined by the Mayor, Marty Walsh, who received a citation for such efforts. For convention attendees, that may need some more work. The pedestrian walk time duration near the convention center was just enough time to (walk quickly) and only reach the road's median. No surprise – as the town is for the young, and this new area was likely designed by them: Boston's median resident age is 31.7. The event exhibition hall was the expected mix of food service providers, furnishings, bathroom supplies, technology suppliers, and health-related products for the senior living industry.  There were quite a few sizable technology companies known in the CCRC/Senior Housing market, including CDW, Stanley Healthcare, Panasonic, LG CNS, Hamilton CapTel, IN2L, SimpleC, Care Innovations. Here are just five new technologies drawn from the event, with the material from the company websites:

Some tech companies don’t see the senior market as an opportunity. They are the Peter Pan tech firms, the ones in which no one (including the customer) ever ages (you might know them as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Twitter). Meanwhile, from Nashville, France, and Germany, others see inclusion and extra services as good business, maybe because this market is pretty much ignored by the gang of four. Here are five companies that vary a platform or a product to make it more useful for an older adult market or service. – All material is derived from the vendor websites or press releases:

How retro: Bed sensors come into the mainstream.  These days, we seem to be really obsessed with tracking our sleep. Or rather, tech firms like Samsung want to track our sleep with their tech. SLEEPSense will give you a sleep score (Yay!) and even turn off the TV if you've fallen asleep while watching. That's why they invested in EarlySense, an Israeli company, and made an effort to learn ways to improve sleep quality. But this isn't really new:  tech trying to improve sleep has been around the wearables market for a while, along with white noise generators and the like. BamLabs, for example, was noted (or notable) at least four years ago with its bed sensor offering.

Alexa made me write about voice.  We signed up early for this Amazon Echo home control/music library accessed through a Pringle can looking box.  True, it needs to be connected to broadband and yes, it needs to be plugged into a wall outlet. But it has no keyboard, only voice input through a lighted-ring of seven microphones listening, continuously learning speech patterns. What to ask this smart-aleck Alexa?  Well, it turns out, it can play an amazing ‘shuffle’ of music you may have purchased through Amazon, but if you are an Amazon Prime member ($99/year), it can also play any of a million songs.  And it has the ability to set up logic scripts (If This, Then That) – links between wake-up alarms and turning on the lights. Oh, and did you know that to encourage voice-tech adoption, Amazon is also launching a $100 million Alexa Fund?