Keeping An Eye On Grandma Over the Internet

So if the ol’ bitch falls and can’t get up, then you get an SMS to go deal with it?

As you said this will give people a false sense of security and could be potentially dangerous. It cannot replace responsible care.

My mom always knew where I was. She always insisted on me calling her and let her know where I was, what I was doing, who I was with and when I was getting back home. In college, I got a call after every meal, even asking if I was chewing my food correctly.

Where was my privacy then? Where was the ACLU when I wanted to stay until 11 PM but my mom “wouldn’t let me”.

It is time to get even. And technology is my ally…..

Don’t get me wrong. I love my mom (now) and I know that all that over-protection was a weird way of saying “I love you”…

So now I will say “I love you mom” with a little help from Silicon Valley: using, sensors, webcams, blood monitoring devices, and every cavity sensoring probe I can connect to an USB port.

I love you mom! (and yes, I was drunk that night after the AC/DC concert. That story about too much Robitussin was a lie)

This sounds like a very good idea to me. It will allow people to keep some of their independence, to keep some old people out of care homes.

Great post. On a different topic has anyone notice the new scrolling function in Google Adsense?

@Zack - naw you just feed it to Twitter

How about using this for home/vacation house security ??

I might be biased (full disclosure: a friend of mine works for 4homemedia) but I think it’s a huge step forward. There are many elderly who are forced into assisted living or nursing homes simply because they need monitoring that can’t be done at home. This represents a huge cost to them, their families and often society as a whole (when government assistance comes into play). While this, like all other technologies, could have a dark side I think the possible upside of what 4hm is doing far outweighs the downside.

I can just imagine adding dear old granny to my Netvibes RSS feeds…

Alive… Alive… Still Alive… Inheritance Update!

And why just keep it in the home? A bluetooth pendant could easily transmit vital signs to an internet-enabled mobile phone.

This would be particuarly useful for when granny goes snowboarding off-piste, cave diving in Peru or shopping in Ikea.

it’s like locking a bird up in a cage. Not many grandmas would agree to this, and not many grandmas need caring to this extreme.

#7 - I completely agree!

This would not have made sense several years ago, but given all the advancements, it’s time has come with health care being what it is in the US.

This has potential. Funny, today I was discussing Healthcare 2.0 with a doctor. How healthcare technologies leveraging the internet are gaining traction. I think there is a HUGE shift coming in the disruption (collusion) of the 3 PBM’s.

btw- @8: inheritance update via RSS feeds was funny as hell!

I agree 7 and 10. The time has come to find innovative ways to keep our elders in the home longer. Technology like this will help give family and informal caregivers peace of mind. I would like to see insurance companies reimburse people for this stuff. It is much cheaper then paying for some of the long term care services. Let’s be proactive for once.

Now this could be the first economically viable application to really monitize the home broadband network!

TONS of potential, but they don’t seem to have the courage to just blanket seniors’ homes with cameras, which is what it would really take to be effective.

Or do they? It’s not clear exactly what their “sensors” and “realtime metrics” are measuring. TONS of markteting bullshit for every ounce of information.

Look, one of my grandparents who lives alone recently bent down to pick something up, felt light in the head, fell, and spent many hours collapsed on the bathroom floor before anyone knew.

There’s no “realtime metic” any motion detector is going to tell me that would detect that. Period. But a simple camera would, even just a live camera without much of a rewind would let me detect it within minutes.

Get serious. Seniors are living a life or death, perilous journey each time they cross the room. If you want to pander to the privacy concerns of their children or grandchildren, feel free to fade into obscurity.

But FFS, this is an opt-in product, right? It requires a hardware installation in the frikkin’ house, right? Well, hell. Go for broke. Protect these people. Do what it takes. Goddammit.

But if they’re going to quibble about privacy, or, more likely, if their family members are going to quibble about watching them poo and masturbate, as they surely do, then we’re all going to continue our little culture of ignore-them-till-they-die, which most folks are in fact happy with, underneath.

This is a product aiming to turn over the most rotten rock in our culture: the way we treat our elders. No one wants that to happen. Deadpool.

My aunt built up an entire home surveillance system similar to this as part of her effort to take complete control of my grandmother’s life. Once she had robbed her of several hundred thousand dollars and had no more use for her, she took her into the one spot with no cameras and bashed her head into the wall. I’m not blaming the technology for causing the problems, but it definitely enabled her.

Are you kidding me? First off monitoring granny, then your home and what has been said about the privacy of the data being sent over the internet? Are we really going to open up our homes to this kind of activity monitoring? Really, you could just call granny and actually speak to her, you know the old fasioned way where they get to feel included in family life, rather than a pet being monitored. This sounds great first off, but really I can only see it as a de-localisation of responsibility. Or am I getting this all wrong?

I honestly see how this could be use in a negative way but can’t almost anything?

I think the good outweighs the bad, especially for families they don’t live nearby. I talk to my parents constantly, but sometimes we go days without talking, when they’re older this could be immensely useful, even if just a way to know they haven’t fallen, or something happened.

Perfect example, my mother and her other half drive a tractor trailer across country, my mother’s boyfriend’s mom stays at home when they go. The trip is a week or two at times. They speak to her constantly, but recently her health had started to degrade, they didn’t want to ship her to a home, and couldn’t afford to give up their lively hood, but needed to be able to ensure she was taking her medicine and eating right. She was stubborn and didn’t like anyone worrying on her.

This would have saved them tons of money that was spent on a nurse to visit her a few times a week and would have been more effective (read 24/7). They would have known sooner that she wasn’t taking her medicine right while they were away, and that she was having trouble moving from room to room.

So yeah, I think its a excellent idea, as long as its agreed upon by both parties and isn’t a substitute for actually interacting with family as well.

Home health monitoring is not exactly a new idea anymore, but it is an idea whose time certainly has come.

Finding ways to care for people at home rather than in the hospital after things get complicated is the key to containing our otherwise unstoppable and unsustainable healthcare spending, now over $2 trillion per year in the United States.

One point that these technology centered approaches often miss: Rather than loading up on technology, the key is to find ways to use frequent communication and connection to change behavior - like taking medications properly, improving diet and exercise, and recognizing problems early.

The demand for this type of monitoring already exists, there are pendant type alarms that communicate with 24/7 control centres via a telephone line.

So I would guess it’s a question of when, not if, this type of service is provided via the Internet. The main difference with this business model is that the monitoring alerts a relative, rather than a control centre. I’m sure there would be takers for both types of service.

Where is the older person’s viewpoint in this discussion? Services based on asking older people what they want will have a better chance of adoption and success.

(Please can I request the facility to report inappropriate posts? Zach’s choice of words is just wrong, no?).

The UK government is convinced of the value of this technology and has, for the past two years, been providing funding to councils (who provide services to older and disabled people) to encourage them to provide it to clients to help them remain living independently at home.

Interestingly, the issues raised in the comments here concerning the rights and wrongs of surveillance are hardly ever raised in the UK and, when they are, do not produce the kinds of responses seen here. Most older people, given the choice of going into a care home or remaining in their own home with monitoring, much prefer the latter and would object if it were removed.

One of the benefits not mentioned by any of the comment posters here is that some older people and their families find that when their health and safety is being monitored remotely family members are not constantly phoning them just to ‘just see if you are all right’. Both parties can resent those calls which become a chore for the person making them and a source of suspicion on the part of the older person that the caller is just wanting to see if they have inherited yet. When monitoring is done by technology, phone conversations can go back to being ‘real’ communications and the quality of relationships improve.

For anyone who is interested in being alerted to developments in this field, my site Telecare Aware (http://www.telecareaware.com) posts news items every week.

Further to my comment yesterday, anyone still doubting the value of monitoring may want to read this article published today in the Worksop Guardian, a local newspaper in the UK. It is entitled: Worksop OAP’s brush with the ’silent killer’.

http://www.worksopguardian.co......3660761.jp

Not a new idea of course. These types of systems have been constructed out of off-the-shelf components (e.g. webcams, home automation systems) for quite a while.

Independent Living has offered such a system for many years. ADP provides the back-end service center.
The largest Personal Emergency Response System vendor, LifeLine, was acquired 18 months ago by Phillips.

As LifeLine’s growth curves made obvious: there are a large and growing number of elderly whose families are remotely located. That said, these systems can feel very intrusive. More over, aides who may assist elderly with monitored homes can really resent the surveillance.

What’s interesting here is the attempt to provide a simple consumer retail package appropriate for big box store distribution.

I have found a revolutionary new product that monitors the activities of daily living of at risk seniors who want to live independently in the comfort of their own home for as long as possible. The system sends alerts and alarms to the children or caregivers to notify them of abnormal events or activities via the internet. The system can also detect falls in the bathroom and send an alarm to our 7 x 24 emergency response center. This technology uses motion detectors to establish a normal pattern of daily activity and when that pattern changes it automatically notifies the caregiver so they can intervene early before the problem gets worse.
No camera to invade privacy. I have it installed in my Aunt’s home and it works. The system has been proven and installed in the Assisted Living environment for over 3 years.
http://www.quietcare1.com for a full demonstration.

Jerry (23) - how long does something have to be around before it ceases to be ‘revolutionary’ and ‘new’? As someone who tries to monitor new product developments in this field (20) I’m quite interested in where these terminological boundaries are.

QuietCare is the brand under which Independent Living, the owner of the intellectual property on which it is based, markets the service. It is also the service to which I referred in my earlier post.

Note: “Jerry Smith” says ” I have found a revolutionary product” as if he is a consumer who has chanced on a terrific find. He later says that the system alerts “our” response center which implies that he is associated with the company. QuietCare may be a useful product, but if Jerry is, in fact, associated with the company, planting a comment isn’t a truthful way to promote it. Please be aware, I have no affiliation with the product or the company.

As people say, this is a development who’s time has come. Time has come. It has to. We can’t afford the scale and quality of care required without applying this type of approach to signficant part of the care value chain. This applies in all kinds of societies, not just ageing Western ones. China intends to implement a comprehensive health care system by 2010. This will include elements of networked halth and care.

This subject is somthing we’re doing a lot on here in Hull, England. We’re currently deplying a elders care project, a cardiac care project, and independent living pilot using broadband IPTV, with community, commercial and public service partners (as an example, see http://www.wtchull.com/Telehealth.html). We’re not the only ones doing this - we’re collaborating with others around England (see http://www.dc10plus.net/dc10/d.....ent-living) & there’s quite a bit of stuff going on re this around the EU.

But’ it’s not just about care. Also about personalised and more productive services. Also, brings a connected gateway into the home, people can do what they want and control what happens to them. This is a way of making sure there are multiple returns of investment and citizens get more value from whatever’s put in their homes.

It’s important to work with the people it’s supposed to benefit, not imposing something on them. That’s what we’re doing. This includes communications so we’re building two way video communcations into the next pahse of development

It’s crucially about transformed care business models that enable people to live longer, happier and cheaper. As Steve Hard’s website shows, there’s plenty of stuff out there. It’s a question of how it’s used to make sure the citizen, service provider & the care funder (public or private) gets the benefit.