How to Capitalize on Home Health Tech

Talk to just about anybody, and they'll have a story to share about an aging loved one. Often, those stories are punctuated with feelings of worry, guilt and uncertainty over how to best care for their elderly parent or friend.

Factor in the astronomical costs of long-term care, and it's easy to see why some healthcare analysts believe the digital home healthcare industry will grow from a $2 billion business today to a $20 billion industry by 2020.

With little direction from insurance companies, regulators and the seniors industry in general, vendors are rolling out products and services in a rather willy-nilly fashion. "It's somewhat chaotic right now," says industry expert Laurie Orlov of market research firm Aging In Place Technology Watch.

Despite the chaos, home health technology can be divided into several key segments:

• Safety and security
• Health and wellness (telehealth)
• Communication and engagement
• Comfort and convenience
• Mobility and mental acuity (brain games)

While traditional home systems integrators can participate in any of these areas, most commonly they use their skills to keep seniors safe in their homes and connected to friends, family and professional care givers.

Safety & Security
When we think of home health, we generally recall the once-popular (and often spoofed) help-I've-fallen-and-I-can't-get-up television ads touting the life-saving convenience of an emergency pendant - part of a class of products and services known as personal emergency reporting systems (PERS).

While easy to install, and often profitable to sell, healthcare professionals claim PERS is often marketed improperly and implemented in a vacuum.

Orlov responded recently to an article in a security trade magazine that touts PERS as a rather easy way for security dealers to boost recurring revenue. The article in question quotes a dealer who says: "It's inexpensive. When people are at this time in life, they look at the cost of facilities, and they're astronomical."

Orlov counters, "Selling any variant of PERS as a cheap alternative to assisted living or nursing homes is simply capitalizing on the fear that both seniors and their family members have."

She fears that the easy money in PERS "invites vendors who know nothing about seniors and less than nothing about how to mitigate the risks of falls faced living in their homes. Maybe it is an obstacle course of furniture, a shaky or inappropriate walker, inappropriate prescriptions that make them dizzy when they stand up, or they have problems resulting from dementia or isolation."

Clearly, while PERS can serve as a safety net after-the-fact, it does little to prevent or mitigate serious problems before they occur.

Better than PERS

Most healthcare professionals recommend more proactive monitoring solutions for activities of daily living (ADL). These systems employ a combination of small, unobtrusive environmental sensors, a networking base unit, specially configured software, and the Internet to communicate the daily routines of those being monitored.

The sensors, similar to those of home security systems, can be used in a variety of ways: planted underneath the carpet by the bed, they can monitor a user's sleep patterns; attached to the refrigerator door, they can track when the user has last eaten. By the stove, they can alert someone if the user has forgotten to turn off the burner; placed in a hallway, they can monitor if the loved one is moving around and maintaining their regular schedule.

"It's a very proactive and effective assessment tool," says Laura Mitchell of GrandCare Systems, a manufacturer of monitoring systems for seniors. "Through ADL information gathered by our system, we've been able to help diagnose certain medical problems like sleepwalking and urinary tract infections."