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Stuart Garfield
MHT's Marc Songini: Technology to keep seniors healthy
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Getting old (as the song, written by a now-elderly man) says, is a drag, both on the national economy and on the elderly themselves, whose accumulating ailments often mean losing their freedom to institutional health-care givers.
The challenge isn’t that the basic technologies are unavailable — it’s packaging and presenting them to the elderly so they’ll use them. While baby boomers will most likely be comfortable with using technology to assist them, that isn’t the case with people who are around 70 years old now, say experts.
But networking and device technologies can allow the elderly to be self sufficient while permitting some monitoring and interaction with health-care professionals or family. The applications are vast in potential and take the form of virtual pets (think DigiPets for older folks) or web-based touchscreens.
“The market is endless,” said Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, which specializes in researching technologies to assist the elderly. “It’s about all of us. What we’re trying to do is support the quality of life.”
However, the efforts so far — which include 911 emergency and other health services technologies — have fallen short of being comprehensive, at least in part because the current crop of seniors aren’t comfortable with them. “Many, many older people, particularly those most expensive to Medicare, are not only technology-averse — they are frightened of it,” said Richard Besdine, director of Providence, R.I.-based Brown University’s Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research.
Coughlin agreed, saying the key to offering seniors useful technology is to downplay the science and emphasize the human need.
“Long before Facebook, we had friends,” he said. “If a young man won’t buy it, neither will an old man.”
His MIT lab’s approach to senior health has been to develop a small device called a “pharm animal.” This electronic device takes the form of a pet. Each time the senior takes their medication, they notify the pet. “If you don’t take the medication, the pet gets sicker and sicker and shuts off or dies, depending on how cruel you want to be,” said Coughlin.
He’s taken it a further step — the device can be networked via pager technology to a pharm animal owned by, say, a grandchild. If the child sees the pet’s condition worsening, they can call their grandparent and prompt compliance. Coughlin is looking for a corporate partner to assist with further tests and commercialization, he said.
In a similar vein is the Sherborn-based startup Careful Products Inc., which offers a web-based subscription service to provide remote health monitoring and support to the senior’s own house. Launched in January, the service uses e-mail, telephone, voice mail, text messaging and videoconferencing technology to help seniors adhere to their medical routines, without sacrificing their independence, said Robert Frieden, the founder of Careful Products. “The big problem with seniors is that they want to be independent,” said Frieden. “People worry about seniors living alone because they can’t track their (medication) compliance.”
Careful Products’ approach is to keep the technology as simple as possible for the seniors — it only requires them to touch a screen to operate the system. Frieden has been bootstrapping the company and is looking for $1.5 million in initial investment.
“Essentially, it’s a social network for elderly people,” said Jacquelyn Kung, a Boston-based consultant in elderly services who serves as an adviser to Careful Products. There are components of this service that already exist — monitoring, drug-compliance tools — but this integrates them all, along with communication capabilities for live human interaction, she said.
Other approaches being developed in the region include using robots. Two years ago, Bedford-based iRobot Corp. briefly showcased a prototype of an “elder care” robot named “CiCi.” However, while the company sees elder health care as a growth opportunity (see related story), iRobot has declined to comment on CiCi and its status, stating that the company “does not disclose products we’re building for the future.”
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