Microchips: The tiny keys to senior independence

Amazing technological progress, coupled with equally amazing easy access to this through a single retail outlet, are opening up small homes as safe, affordable alternatives for senior housing.

Integrating circuits embedded on silicon chips have evolved in a remarkable way—becoming ever more powerful as they get smaller. The result has been that “smart” functions of all kinds can be performed by small devices that are easily accommodated within limited living spaces or even by one’s own pocket or wrist.

This very recent trend has been dubbed the Internet of Things (IOT).

The “things” include voice-activated speakers, medication management devices, sensors that monitor physical activity and function and even perform medical examinations.

A variety of IOT devices have been pulled together and marketed by a nationwide, ubiquitous chain store called Best Buy. Over the past three years the store has made a point of acquiring, manufacturing and integrating the IOT as it applies to senior care.

First, in 2017, it launched a product line called Assured Living, sensor technology that monitors seniors’ activity levels at home and offers reassuring feedback and dysfunction alerts to family caregivers nearby. The next year saw the company’s acquisition of Great Call, a developer of smart phones, smart watches, medical alert devices and the like, a subsidiary that gone on to play a lead role in testing and expanding the marketplace.

More recently Best Buy has partnered with TyTo Care, which manufactures medical examination devices that are key to the development of increasingly popular telehealth programs, which enable physicians to examine, diagnose and treat patients remotely from healthcare locations far away. More recently Best Buy acquired Critical Signals Technologies serving the same market.

Finally, the store has moved into marketing wearable sensors with the acquisition of BioSensics.

A key to the growth and outreach of this market will be Best Buy’s famous Geek Squad, known to one and all home computer users for their at-home technical support for the technologically frustrated. Geek Squad is now charged with helping homeowners install, coordinate and successfully implement IOT devices in their own homes.

Probably sooner than later those homes will include ADUs, granny pods and microapartments designed to accommodate aging seniors safely and comfortably.

Of course, Best Buy isn’t alone in serving this marketplace. Sensor developers of various stripes are out there pioneering in senior housing as well. Information is available from the newsletter Aging and Health Technology Watch.

As always with computer technology, it always pays to investigate before committing—to look before leaping. Questions must be asked, for example: is the IOT something that can be integrated easily and relatively simply into a daily lifestyle? Will access to the information it provides be practically useful to recipients? More globally, and troublingly, will these devices be designed to resist hacking, with dangerous invasions of privacy and malfunction as a result?

Pay attention to the answers. If satisfied, you’re ready to move on to the next significant step toward trying the small home alternative.

New Technology For Small House Living

The key to small home living for seniors is the new technology that provides home dwellers with the personal assistance they’ve never had before.

Spoken word voice-activated technology can provide medication information, access to shopping, direct contact with a physician’s office, the day’s news or the music of one’s choice. You may have heard of Amazon’s Alexa, the oddly tubular structure to which people speak and give commands from locations throughout the house. Amazon’s Echo Dot is a small disc and gives access to Alexa’s offerings even more conveniently and unobtrusively. Offering similar benefits are Google Assistant, Bixby by Samsung, Siri from Apple and Cortana from Microsoft.

Meanwhile strategically placed sensors can detect when someone has fallen or has stayed in bed too long, immediately conveying an alert to a loved one living in another location. Leading technology companies are developing these monitoring systems, which go by such names as Wellness from Alarm.com or MyNotifi. They are designed not as personal “spies,” watching everything you do, but as motion sensors programmed to give appropriate warnings, enhancing the safety of seniors living alone.

This new technology is crucial to supporting small home living which, otherwise, would amount to stashing older people out of sight and out of mind. That appalling idea is not what granny pods, in-law suites and microapartments are all about for this age group.

This cutting-edge technology is still in very early stages, with advances occurring almost daily and many questions remaining: Will seniors have access to the wi-fi or broadband that enable these technologies? Can sensor technology remain relatively secure and immune to hacking? Will seniors and their loved ones want to deal with these devices and pay their costs, which are relatively minor compared to assisted living and skilled nursing care but still there? Will manufacturers come up with compelling ways to market these devices to homeowners and apartment managers?

All this continues to be worked out, but a good way of keeping track of these developments can be found at the online newsletter Aging in Place Technology Watch, offered for the past decade by aging technology guru Laurie Orlov. Says Orlov, “Voice-activated is our third level of technological innovation, following introduction of the cell phone and the connected web. Useful voice activation has finally become feasible and therefore will become part of our lives.”

Her newsletter can be found at ageinplacetech.com.