Telehealth-RPM-Virtual Visits-Voice Health

What is the line between a distinct product market and tech customization?  In 2009 when the original Market Overview was published, the search began to identify the small group of entrepreneurs focused on serving seniors – from the AirGuru SV1 Video Phone and Big Screen Live all the way to WellAware and Wellcore.  Why note such a market, you might ask? All of those companies and many others had the heart and focus to try to craft something usable by and for an older adult. In many cases these were inventions compensating for a gap in care and oversight, but most often filling a gap in internet access and/or usability of devices and software.

There is more to the world of aging-related technologies than CES. Seriously, can that be true? And yes, I actually know several people who asked me in the past week -- what is CES? My explanation was weak -- there were no follow-up questions. Anyway, these five companies that have been focused on technology to help older adults made recent announcements of changes to their business strategies, products, and/or branding approaches. Each in its own way offers a milestone for the industry -- but taken together, the announcements demonstrate a focus on the older adult population and new ways to deliver benefit for them by providing additional products, service innovations and partnerships during 2015. Text comes directly from company websites:

The Wall Street Journal thinks that tech will change your life. Perhaps it will even rock your 2015.  Rocking their 2015 is just the kind of experience that WSJ readers -- average age of 57 -- really want.  But the Journal, ever hopeful for pushing down the subscriber age into the ad world's desirable 20’s and 30’s, hopes that the readers will be as excited as their current breathless tech columnists Fowler and Stern. So they want its boomer audience to grasp How to Get Ready. But of course! Starting with Windows 10 – which will have a resurrected Start menu and yes, it will improve multi-tasking – by the fall of 2015. Now aren't you excited?

The mHealth Summit held last week was an ever-more HealthIT (along with Digital Health and mHealth brethren) and the mobile/app aware, digital vision for the future, an extravaganza of technology advancement -- sounding vaguely familiar. Hey, there’s the renamed Patient Centered Medical Home, at this conference, called the Intelligent Medical Home). There were all of those Games for Health, behavior change, patient engagement, care coordination, and quite a few pharma-sponsored sessions. As is typical of an event like this, a plethora of investment-related, venture fund and startup-type sessions could be found.