Keeping An Eye On Grandma Over the Internet

Repost from TechCrunch
There are probably hundreds of new products launching at CES this week, but one that caught my eye has nothing to do with LCD screens or mobile ad platforms. A Sunnyvale, California startup called 4HomeMedia announced the availability of a broadband home health monitoring service called Home HealthPoint. It provides a way for family members or other caregivers to monitor an elderly person’s activities at home (through a box that talks to a broadband modem and sensors in the house) and receive alerts if something is amiss.

According to the press release:
By creating a passive monitoring network around a senior in their normal home setting, both family members and professional care-givers can log into a personalized Web page and get historical trend data, real-time status updates, and proactive alerts about the health and well-being for that monitored elder

The recommended starter kit for the IL service includes the Home HealthPoint, three motion detectors, and an emergency pendant. The motion detectors are strategically placed around the home during the professional installation in the bedroom, at the entrance to the primary bathroom, and in the main trafficked area such as a foyer or living room. Additional sensor devices such as additional motion detectors, access contacts on the refrigerator or doors, a smart pillbox, or IP cameras can be utilized to supplement the monitoring data sets being produced within the home.

Grandma can also plug in medical devices such as a digital weight scale, a blood-pressure cuff, or a glucose meter. The startup envisions this service being sold by broadband providers like cable or phone companies for an extra $30 to $100 a month, “a bargain in comparison to the on average $72,000 annual fee for transitioning a senior into an assisted living facility.”

That’s right, folks. Put an emergency pendant on Grandma, set up those motion detectors, and you can put off the nursing home for another three to five years. Want to check in on her without actually, you know, calling her? Just check the Webcam.

I can’t decide whether this represents a step forward or backwards for civilization. On the one hand, there is no doubt that something like this could definitely help improve healthcare for the elderly. Many live at home alone and an early warning system (Is Grandma eating regularly? Is she taking her pills? Has she been in bed all day?) could be a true life saver.

On the other hand, checking on whether an elderly parent is functioning normally is not the same as checking to see if your home alarm went off or you remembered to turn off the lights. (4HomeMedia also offers home-automation and remote media-management software based on the same technology). There is a limit to how much remote monitoring can be relied upon when it comes to healthcare. This is certainly better than no monitoring at all, but I wonder if it will result in giving people a false sense of security or making some elderly folks feel even more isolated than they do today.

Senior citizens embrace technology

Verne Biehl, 79, first learned to play the piano when he was 12 years old, but he took lessons only a year and later regretted not being able to play well.
Nearly 67 years have passed since he first had an opportunity to return to study the instrument he always loved.

Except, now his lessons are taught on a digital piano.

Technology has caught up with Verne Biehl and he is taking it in stride.

"The digital piano is interesting, a little different than a straight piano,” said this Marietta resident. It feels much different than my manual one.”

For millions of Americans who grew up without computers or the Internet, cell phones, iPods, global positioning systems, digital cameras (remember the flash bulb?) Nintendo or even a television, catching up with technology can be a daunting challenge.

“If you don't learn about it, you feel like you've been left behind,” said Karen Burfield of Marietta. “I'm just learning about the computer. My three daughters are encouraging me. I do e-mail and look things up.”

Burfield and Biehl are among a steadily growing army of seniors who are eagerly accepting the challenge and diving into the technical “soup.”

Both take classes at the O'Neill Senior Center in Marietta, introducing them to new technologies and to sharpen their basic skills.

For Burfield, the handwriting was on the wall when the doctor's office where she had worked for years, suddenly turned up with computers. It was do or die.

“I had to get on the computer to look things up,” she said. “I learned the basics.”
After she retired in 2003, Burfield joined a creative writing class at O'Neill Center and used the computer to help facilitate her writing.

“I'm really still just learning about it,” she said. “It helps me with writing. The one thing I hate is when something goes wrong and I have to ask for help.”


Read the entire article at The Marietta Times

Frail seniors embrace home monitoring

When John Fowlkes’s adult daughter suggested installing an electronic monitoring system in his apartment to oversee his well-being from afar, “I was very skeptical,” he says. To Fowlkes, 86, who has an active social life including an 80-year-old girlfriend, the idea evoked thoughts of Big Brother.

Mindful that a younger friend had fallen at home and lain on the floor for hours before anyone came to help, Fowlkes, of Raleigh, N.C., gave in. To his surprise, he found the setup “makes you feel more secure.”
Overseeing the aged from afar is a hot issue for working caregivers, and the technology needed to do so is available. But policy makers and others have long fretted that seniors would resist electronic monitoring as an invasion of privacy.

Now, Big Brother has arrived — and seniors are rolling out the welcome mat. As vendors make in-home monitoring systems widely available, seniors are mounting little resistance, and many are embracing the gadgetry as an aid to remaining independent.

Home-monitoring customers total a few thousand nationwide, according to half a dozen monitoring companies I surveyed. The most common systems use wireless motion or contact sensors on doorways, windows, walls, ceilings, cabinets, refrigerators, appliances or beds to track seniors’ movements. Temperature sensors gauge heat and air conditioning. If an elderly person enters the bathroom and doesn’t come out, or other typical activity patterns aren’t recorded in the home, word can be sent to family members, 24-hour response workers or both. The systems also offer hand-held or wearable “panic buttons.”

The QuietCare system used by Fowlkes is monitored by response workers. His daughter, Alisa Washington, who lives nearby, receives e-mail updates several times a day at work. She says it gives her “much greater peace of mind.”

Seniors draw the line at some kinds of surveillance. Many protest against the presence of video cameras, says DR. Majd Alwan, who conducted several small studies of monitoring systems as a professor at the University of Virginia. They see motion and contact sensors as less invasive, says Alwan, now director of the Center for Aging Services Technologies, Washington, D.C., a nonprofit research group.

See CantonRep.com

Brainpower now obsolete thanks to GPS and iTunes

The gurus seek bliss amid mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a GPS.

Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my GPS. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, "Make a U-turn if possible."

After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

My GPS goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.
Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn't want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.
Personal information? I've externalized it. I'm no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can't remember their own phone number. Their smart phones are smart, so they don't need to be. Today's young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It's merely my autonomy that I'm losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain't got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind - one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don't matter, Ma. I'll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I'll be there. Wherever there's a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I'll be there. Wherever there's a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I'll be there. I'll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook - I'll be there, too.

I am one with the external mind. Om.

New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age

Older people are sticky.

That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.

The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook — with wrinkles.

And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next.

“Teens are tire kickers — they hang around, cost you money and then leave,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog “Infectious Greed.” Where Friendster was once the hot spot, Facebook and MySpace now draw the crowds of young people online.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.”

This prospective and relative stickiness is helping drive a wave of new investment into boomer and older-oriented social networking sites that offer like-minded (and like-aged) individuals discussion and dating forums, photo-sharing, news and commentary, and chatter about diet, fitness and health care.

Last week, VantagePoint Ventures, an early investor in MySpace, announced that it had led a $16.5 million round of financing for Multiply, a social networking site aimed at people who are settled.

In August, Shasta Ventures led a $4.8 million financing round for TeeBeeDee, a site coming out of its test stage this month. The name is short for “To Be Determined” (as in: just because you’re not trolling for a mate on MySpace doesn’t mean your life is over.)

Also in August, Johnson & Johnson spent $10 million to $20 million to acquire Maya’s Mom, a social networking site for parents, according to a person briefed on the deal. The site has been in existence about a year.

Social networking has so far focused mainly on businesspeople and young people because they are tech-savvy and are treasured by Madison Avenue.

But there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.

TeeBeeDee’s founder is Robin Wolaner, who in 1987 created Parenting magazine. That year, at least seven magazines focused on being a parent were started, and Ms. Wolaner said she was seeing the same sudden recognition of a need for Internet publishers to respond to the demands of older Americans.

She came up with the idea for the site, she said, “when I was sitting around with friends and we said, ‘We’re not going to hang out at the AARP site. What is there for us?’ ” (Plus, she said, she wanted to find a community where she could discuss her interest in getting an eye lift).

“There’s a recognition that this generation now uses the Internet just like younger people,” she said. “The one thing this generation hasn’t done yet is network online.”

Read the entire article on NYTimes.com

Respecting, and liking, these elders

USC gerontology students find that living with Kingsley Manor's senior citizens is anything but old hat.

When USC graduate student Shaun Rushforth wants his gerontology studies to come to life, all he has to do is open the door to his East Hollywood apartment and walk down the hallway. The very quiet hallway.

That's because Rushforth and two other USC students are the youngest residents (by at least four decades) at Kingsley Manor Care Center, a facility that otherwise houses 260 senior citizens in various stages of independence and nursing care. The young people live there under an unusual arrangement that complements their academic research about the elderly and offers a terrific deal in Los Angeles' expensive rental market.

"It's like living in the dorms without all the parties, and everyone is over 65. It's great," said Rushforth, 27, who is considering a career in geriatric medicine.

In exchange for 16 hours a week of duties, such as teaching tai chi or running a bingo game, the students from USC's Davis School of Gerontology get a free room or apartment about a half-hour from campus and all the dining hall meals they can fit into their schedule. But more important, they say, they learn crucial lessons for careers -- and about their own lives and mortality.

Off-duty, they may help a disoriented senior find her way back to the right room. Sometimes they coach an eager septuagenarian on the mysteries of e-mail and the Internet. Often they spend time just listening to someone review the ups and downs of a long life.

"They're learning ahead of time what it's like to be old," retired middle school teacher Roger Goulet, 90, said of the students.

"There's a big spectrum of old age here, and they can learn what mistakes to avoid in life."

Read the entire article on LAtimes.com

Local community assists seniors independent living with telecare

Telecare can support vulnerable people in the community so they have better safety, care, choice and independence in their own homes.
Telecare uses discreet sensors and communications technology, which can be installed in the home to provide remote support to people who are vulnerable. It can include detectors or monitors such as bed sensors, motion or falls sensors, fire and gas detectors that trigger a warning to a response centre.

Telecare has the potential to support individuals to live at home and to complement traditional care. It can also give carers more personal freedom and reassurance.

Cllr Maureen Cummings, Cabinet Member for Adults and Health, said: “We want to do all we can to support vulnerable and older people by giving them more opportunities to be independence in their own homes.”

Read the entire article on eGov Monitor

Microsoft Online Health Records With HealthVault

Microsoft launched HealthVault in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records. Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.

With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.

But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle. Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries. By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes. Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves. A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.

Source: TechCrunch

Seniors may get mixed signals

WASHINGTON — Elderly people may be the most vulnerable to losing television reception when the nation's broadcasters go digital in less than 18 months, members of Congress and advocates for seniors say.

A study in July showed that a disproportionate number of people who rely on "over-the-air” signals through an antenna are senior citizens. And without a coordinated national campaign to educate people about the digital transition, set for Feb. 17, 2009, millions of elderly people could be cut off from television.

"We all need to do a lot more outreach to prepare our seniors,” Jonathan Adelstein, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, told a Senate panel last week.

Adelstein said if a massive public education campaign isn't launched quickly and uninformed people lose television reception, "we're going to have one of the biggest outrages this country has ever seen. It will be a very difficult day in the history of American broadcasting if we don't turn this around.”

Read the entire article on NewsOK.com

WBM Foundation

WBM Foundation, a non-profit assisting seniors with lonliness and social isolation teaching them to play with the Wii

Collective Intelligence: Include The Everyone for Success

Want to be more productive at solving complex problems in groups? Work better in teams? Utilize all of your resources at their fullest potential, no matter how different some individuals might be perceived to be? Maybe you should study the way some ants bury their dead, ways fireflies in some parts of the world light up in synchronization, or the way field honey bees fly from flower to flower, collecting pollen and sweet juices, or nectar to produce honey. Read on; I am serious!

Have you ever been in a meeting and hardly anyone talked? Maybe the few outgoing people were the only ones voicing their opinions. As you might be sitting back in the meeting and listening and thinking to yourself, my thought is not valuable because it is quite different than all the other ideas that are being brought up; so I do not speak up in fear of being different.
I’ll bet you do not know how much your different point of view helps to make the outcome better for all! Without your different perspective the complete group may fail because you followed the opinions of only a few in the group; right or wrong.

If you have a disability or other unique viewpoints on the topic in discussion, or project, or program you are working on, it makes your input even more crucial to produce the very best output possible. I might even argue that if you are disabled, or have other challenges your thoughts are more important, since others do not have your unique viewpoint to offer such help or guidance.

This is true with software or hardware development as well. You would not want to develop inferior software or hardware products that are not accessible or usable by all people. In this highly competitive global market it is best to not limit your customer base to only a portion of the world’s population allowing your competitors to gain an advantage in which you may never have the opportunity to catch up. Include people with disabilities, we are brimming with innovative ideas!

With so much room for improvements in the current approach to working together, some groups and organizations have started to look at nature for resolutions and new ideas. Nature has done well when many members interact with each other with no one person directing, like the ants, fireflies and bees I mentioned

Do you wonder how such positive collaboration can happen?

Have you ever heard of swarm, or collective intelligence?

Swarm, or collective intelligence in one definition; is interacting as one large, self-organized group of computers or groups of people with all individuals fully participating, without infrastructure limitations. This is an emergent behavior, where complex group actions arise from simple local rules.

From Stephen Strogatz: Who Cares About Fireflies? We see fantastic examples of synchrony in the natural world all around us. To give an example, there were persistent reports when the first Western travelers went to South East Asia, back to the time of Sir Francis Drake in the 1500s, of spectacular scenes along riverbanks, where thousands upon thousands of fireflies in the trees would all light up and go off simultaneously. These kinds of reports kept coming back to the West, and were published in scientific journals, and people who hadn't seen it couldn't believe it. Scientists said that this is a case of human misperception, that we're seeing patterns that don't exist, or that it's an optical illusion. How could the fireflies, which are not very intelligent creatures, manage to coordinate their flashings in such a spectacular and vast way?

The answer on how this can happen is swarm, or collective intelligence.
In the May 1, 2001, Harvard Business Review, Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business by Eric Bonabeau and Christopher Meyer talks about the following.
What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed "swarm intelligence," and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. Southwest Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule--they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise--one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.
Listen to NPR: How Ants Bury Their Dead by John Nielsen - All Things Considered, December 9, 2006, the weekly Science Out of the Box segment considers the well-ordered world of ants. Their knack for carefully stacking their dead has sent researchers scurrying to see if humans can learn lessons in efficiency from them.

Ants work together in large groups performing very complicated task with no one leader. They fight battles find food and stack their dead in intricate precise patterns; and re-stack them sorting them as they do so. This research is helping to build robots that have intelligence like ants, among many other very exciting projects.

At the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence they are bringing together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing the way people work together. They are collaborating with other educational institutions, organizations and individuals to better understand and find new ways to leverage collective intelligence.
Just a few of the factors that facilitate collective intelligence from MIT’s Handbook of Collective Intelligence.

• Diversity
• Shared vocabulary and other infrastructure
• Awareness
• Some of the factors that inhibit collective intelligence from MIT’s handbook.
• Biases
• Implementation issues

As you have read or listened, swarm or collective intelligence can be interactions between computer to computer, computer to people or people to people just to name a few of the possible interactions. I would like to focus our discussion on improving collective intelligence between people to people and people to computer.

Collective intelligence can facilitate increased productivity in community, global (multiple organizations and individuals) and corporate project, or program teams. Can aid if you do work in Diversity, looking to leverage all employees uniqueness’s effectively or work in Human Resources and you desire your highly skilled and valued workforce to be agile to allow your employees to use their talents when and where best needed at any particular moment. Explaining why it is essential to develop, maintain and procure accessible and usable applications with universal design following such standards as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and leveraging resources like the ones at Trace Research and Development Center and Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) special Interest Group on Accessible Computing to facilitate and allow all people to contribute equally and effectively. Such standards can leverage IT investments, save time, money and reduce duplication of efforts. It is best to leverage what nature has already perfected. People are just starting to understand and utilize techniques to improve outdated processes. Focus your efforts on actions that will facilitate collective intelligence and resolve any barriers which will inhibit your positive results!

If all people cannot equally participate fully with accessible and usable tools you are inhibiting collective intelligence. You need to create ways to facilitate collective intelligence so you can more easily find highly efficient solutions to your most difficult problems. Then you can adapt automatically to changing markets and environments with agility and grace. Make sure the disabled, or others with challenges can fully participate like all others efficiently. These individuals are your most valued path to your success in fully utilizing the benefits of collective intelligence.

Is anyone seeing results with swarm, or collective intelligence? Are you having implementation issues? What parts of your personal or professional life is this helping with? Do you see how it can help the disabled or others with special needs in their personal or professional life?
I look forward to hearing from you.

To read more about Swarm Behavior look at the excellent resources on Learn More - National Geographic Magazine.

by Bill Tipton: Contributing Author, Global Dialogue Centerhttp://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

Google and Microsoft Look to Change Health Care

In politics, every serious candidate for the White House has a health care plan. So too in business, where the two leading candidates for Web supremacy, Google and Microsoft, are working up their plans to improve the nation’s health care.

By combining better Internet search tools, the vast resources of the Web and online personal health records, both companies are betting they can enable people to make smarter choices about their health habits and medical care.

“What’s behind this is the mass consumerization of health information,” said Dr. David J. Brailer, the former health information technology coordinator in the Bush administration, who now heads a firm that invests in health ventures.

Read the whole article on The New York Times

Resco BrainGain

Resco has released BrainGain a brain training application for Windows Mobile PDAs. What does BrainGain offer you?

You can train and test your memory, your analytical and calculation skills, and improve it significantly. The BrainGain training will also help you concentrate more and increase your brain reflection speed. You will find here simple but very effective brain training games and exercises like solving simple calculation, memory and analytical problems.

Video games are clicking with the senior center set

Doris Meyer wasn't going to let a video game or those last three pins get the better of her.

The 70-year-old grandmother of four squared herself in front of the flat-screen TV, drew her arm back and -- crash! -- the last few pins toppled.

"You got it!" teammate Hal Wehner, 74, shouted from his motorized wheelchair.

Until recently, Meyer and Wehner hadn't bowled in years. But the two have taken up the sport again in the virtual world, regularly playing with

Nintendo's Wii video game in the lounge of the Cedar Crest retirement community in Pequannock.

It's a sign video games are catching on with the elderly.

In a partnership with Nintendo, Erickson Retirement Communities recently installed a few of the $250 Wii (pronounced "We") consoles in each of its 20 campuses nationwide.

"It's a marketing stunt to some extent, but it underscores that the Wii console is not just for the hard- core gamer," said industry analyst Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director for Jupiter Research. "You don't often find a video game that is going to appeal to 6-year-olds and 60-year-olds."

In courting the senior market, video game companies are luring the nation's largest demographic and tapping a growing research field, studying how cognitive activities and games stave off memory disorders.

And it's not just Nintendo.

Over the last few years, several companies, including Vigorous Mind and Lumos Labs, have developed computer games aimed at keeping the mind sharp. This fall, Sony will launch Buzz! The Mega Quiz -- which has attracted gamers of all ages in Europe -- in the United States.

Read the entire article on the Star Ledger