Taking your meds? Sensors will know

Technology is making it easier for baby boomers to monitor their elderly parents.

Armed with everything from sensors, Webcams and GPS devices to pendants and bracelets with emergency buttons, caregivers are increasingly relying on technology to keep track of their parents remotely while allowing those seniors to have a sense of independence. While the market for this technology is wildly fragmented and not easily measured, few doubt it's growing.

"I believe the technologies on the market are very promising. And what is coming down the pike will be more integrated systems that include monitoring wellness, safety, physiological and medication monitoring all tied together into a personal health record," said Majd Alwan, director of the Center for Aging Services Technologies.

Perhaps of greatest interest to tech buffs is what a number of companies are doing to bring various monitoring pieces together. Home Guardian, a start-up that came out of a University of Virginia project, for example, is working on a detector that uses floor sensors, rather than a device strapped to the body, to detect when someone falls.

"Studies have shown that the greatest fear the elderly have is falling. And the second greatest fear, especially for those living alone, is they won't get help quickly," said Steve Kell, Home Guardian's chief technology officer.

Home Guardian sensors are designed to feed information into a PC, which transmits the information to either a monitoring service or caregiver. The fall detector system is scheduled for a commercial beta test in mid-July at a senior housing facility in Florida. The beta will run for six months.

Home Guardian, which has yet to set a price for the system, expects to license the technology to home health care monitoring companies, or home health agencies, which in turn will provide it to consumers.

In Australia, information technology lecturers Peter Leijdekkers and Valerie Gay of the computer systems department for the University of Technology Sydney, are developing a mobile heart rate monitor called Personal Health Monitor.

The monitoring system, which includes a wireless sensor worn by the senior, as well as smart phones, Bluetooth and GPS technologies, is designed to monitor falls, weight and blood pressure in real time--both inside and outside the home.

Information gathered through the wireless sensors is transmitted to the smart phone. That information is then remotely sent to a health care service, or patient's doctor, as well as their caregivers, via text messages.

Webcams linked up to the Personal Health Monitor provide a way to further verify if an elderly parent has fallen, but Gay cautioned: "Patients need to be comfortable (with Webcams). My guess is not a lot of people will want to use it, unless they are in danger."

Although a trial test was held with three patients to test the monitor's viability, a larger clinical test will be held beginning next month and will include 200 heart patients during a 12-month period, Leijdekkers said. The monitor has already generated interest from one large global company, which may ultimately take it to market. The Personal Health Monitor could run as much as $2,500, Leijdekkers said.

Red alert
Technology, some believe, can help people straining under family responsibilities. Long-distance caregivers tend to be 51 years old, on average, with 27 percent of them taking care of a minor living at home and an elderly parent, according to a 2004 survey of 1,130 long-distance caregivers by MetLife Mature Market Institute and the National Alliance for Caregiving. The survey also found that nearly 80 percent of these caregivers work either full time or part time.

To help, several devices are already available that send an immediate alert to a monitoring service, should a senior suffer a fall or ailment while in the home.

A senior wearing a bracelet or pendant with a personal emergency response system (PERS) could hit the emergency button if he or she falls or has a heart attack, for example.

A signal would then be triggered to a communicator device hooked up to the senior's home phone, which would call the monitoring service. The service would then use the communicator as a two-way intercom to talk to the senior and determine whether an emergency vehicle, family member or friend should come over. Philips Lifeline, for example, sells such a service for $35 per month for equipment and monitoring.

[JohnMcGrew]

Who will pay?

"A lot of people think insurance companies should pay for it," Home Guardian's Kell said. "Right now, it's the consumer who pays for these types of systems."

Of course, we'll make the insurance companies pay! Insurance rates will go up further, and then we'll gripe when another 10-million or so consumers decide that they can't afford insurance anymore.

[whisper71]

Medical alerts

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Yes we are paying for them at this point, but I do feel that insurance should help the cause, simply put, if they helped offset the cost with the alerts, then that would in return help keep some people out of nursing care, to which would help lower the over all cost of health care and insurance. We need to look at the bigger picture here.