Tag Archive for: home monitoring

GrandCare featured on Caring.com

The Digital Caregiver

Being “Wired” Never Felt So Reassuring

By Melanie Haiken, Caring.com senior editor

One of the most obvious ways advances in digital technology are changing caregiving is in the use of smartphones. And Caring.com user data shows that half of all caregivers own an iPhone and use it for research and connectivity.

Caregivers aren’t just posting pictures of their dogs and kids, though — they’re using the Web, smartphone apps, and other digital services to help them with the often overwhelming tasks of caregiving. And they need that help — in a recent study, a whopping 88 percent of boomer caregivers reported that caregiving had turned out to be much harder than they expected. In a study titled Retirement Care Planning: The Middle-Income Boomer Perspective, 57 percent of the approximately 500 boomers surveyed said caregiving took more emotional strength and 52 percent said it took more time than they’d expected. Caregiving, they said, was also costing them more financially and causing more stress on their health and relationships than they’d anticipated.

Monitoring remotely is getting easier than ever.

Change has also come to the more established area of home monitoring. “New sensor technologies and great design are bringing new capabilities and sensibilities to the markets of home monitoring and Personal Emergency Response devices,” says Fike. GrandCare, a longterm player in the field, now takes advantage of digital innovations to provide a sophisticated interactive interface in addition to more traditional features such as activity monitoring, alerts, and mediation management. Caregivers and their loved ones can use GrandCare’s multimedia communication interface to share photos, chat via video, and even play games in addition to more traditional home care monitoring.

Read the full article at http://www.caring.com/articles/the-digital-caregiver

Senior Cyborgs: The Rise of the Machine

Today’s featured video is from CES Silvers Summit in 2010. Listen to GrandCare founder, Charlie Hillman, discuss his notion of “Senior Cyborgs: The Rise of the Machines”… Utilizing home monitoring technology enable and enhance the lives of our senior population!

ENJOY

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6s7GHOGfA]

EHX Home Health Tech Pavilion – GREAT SUCCESS!!

Just returned from 5 days in Sunny Orlando (at least they tell us it was sunny) – wouldn’t know, we spent the entire time at the Electronic House Expo at the Orange County Convention Center! And wow – what a great show for the home health technology industry!

Overall, the show attendance was down. We had heard this and wondered what the show would have in store for us! We really couldn’t have been busier, so it really said a LOT about the shift towards home health for the dealers in this industry.

We arrived on Tuesday morning and spent the entire day in the Peabody, revamping GrandCare dealer training for the next day.

Wednesday, we arrived at 8am for GrandCare Authorized dealer training! The room was abuzz as 30 NEW GrandCare dealers loaded in ready to SPEED train as we powered through about 15 hours of material in 7.5….

Great session, the session went great and the dealers were very interactive and seemed to gain a lot of information!!

ON Thursday at 10am, the EHX show floor opened. It appeared to be about less than half of what it was about 2 years ago. A sign of a bad economy, that’s clear. The silver lining is that the people that DO come are the decision makers AND the ones TRULY interested. We had many dealers that came up and said home health tech is the ONLY reason they attended EHX. A truly positive sign for this industry!

GrandCare was pounded ALL day Thursday by interested dealers – we had an extra large booth with 5 GC reps(represented by a few GC staff and Home Controls (Strategic Dist Partner) and Elder-Watch (Master dealer)).

The first panel session moderated by Laurie Orlov was a huge success. It was standing room only as the 4 panelists from GrandCare Systems, Celery, LogicMark and Halo Monitoring explained their products as Laurie Orlov moderated (recap here: http://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/aarp-and-those-boomers-recareerers-and-home-related-professionals)

Later Thursday afternoon, GrandCare hosted the weekly agetech call LIVE FROM THE EHX FLOOR!!! Using a mic and webcam, GrandCare’s Laura Mitchell (host of the agetech call and VP Chair of the AgeTek Alliance board) hosted the weekly call from the GrandCare booth and interviewed other aging and technology vendors as well as some of the interested dealers.
Recording (including video) http://my.dimdim.com/view2/all/grandcare/default/138cae63-c640-42c4-9748-2888bdf11e5e

End of Day One – GREAT SUCCESS & Many Many Leads to show from it. 17 of us from the Aging and technology pavilion went out to celebrate with dinner and drinks at a local watering hole!!

Friday – Day Two…to be continued…