Tag Archive for: The Oaks

1-27-11 Thursday GrandCare Webinar- Stacey Pierce from The Oaks speaks

WHEN: Thursday January 27th, 2pm EDT (1p CT).
WHERE: http://my.dimdim.com/grandcare
WHAT: Stacey Pierce from the Oaks speaks on “Innovative in-home care”

Topic Description:
Caregiving With A Side of Technology
We are caregivers, first and foremost, and with technology we are able to enhance what we can offer to people desiring to stay in their homes. Technology can be an important part of the caregiving puzzle; it takes time and a continued effort on our part, as industry leaders, to continue to provide options to those in need.

About Stacey Pierce:
Stacey is a Certified Occupational Therapist Assistant, working with patients since 1996. In 2007, she joined The Oaks Staff as Director of Senior Solutions, a new home service business for their community. While successfully growing the Senior Solution business, their company recognized the impact that technology could have, and would have, on helping seniors stay at home longer while giving both the senior and the family peace of mind. With both her technology expertise and therapy background, she has the opportunity to play an active role in aging people in place around South Carolina.

Webinar Objectives:
1. Learn to prioritize
2. Enhance services with technology
3. Lead the industry with new innovations

Upcoming Events:

NAPGCM- – May 12-15, 2011 | Sheraton New Orleans Hotel | New Orleans, LA
AgeTek Discounts apply: http://www.caremanager.org/calendar.cfm

GrandCare on CNN

Special Thanks to our long time GrandCare customer, dealer and friend: The Oaks in South Carolina and Peace of Mind Alternatives. Stacey Pierce & James McGee for helping to facilitate and allowing CNN to interview their GrandCare Client. Thank you!

Sensors monitor older people at home
Columbia, South Carolina (CNN) — The sensors know when Charlton Hall Jr. wakes up to go to the bathroom. They know how much time he spends in bed. They watch him do jigsaw puzzles in the den. They tattle when he opens the refrigerator.
Sound like a Big Brother nightmare?
Not for Hall. The 74-year-old finds comfort in monitored living.
“It’s a wonderful system for helping older people to stay independent as long as possible,” he said, sitting in the living room of his 7,500-square-foot house, a sensor watching him from an elaborate bookshelf. “They know where I am — all the time.”
Sensor networks, which made their debut in hospitals and assisted living centers, have been creeping into the homes of some older Americans in recent years.
The systems — which can monitor a host of things, from motion in particular rooms to whether a person has taken his or her medicine — collect information about a person’s daily habits and condition, and then relay that in real-time to doctors or family members.
If Hall opens an exterior door at night, for example, an alert goes out to his doctor, a monitoring company and two of his closest friends, since he doesn’t have family nearby.
“They want to know if I’ve fallen, and where I am,” he said, noting that he’s fallen several times in recent years and also has a chronic heart condition and diabetes.
Hall’s monitoring network, made by a company called GrandCare Systems, features motion-sensors in every room as well as sensors on every exterior door. A sensor beneath the mattress pad on his bed tells health care professionals if he’s sleeping regularly.
All of this connects wirelessly with vital sign monitors, which send his doctor daily reports about his blood-sugar levels, blood pressure and weight. He can see charts about how he’s doing on a touch-screen monitor that sits on a desk in his home office.
This type of set-up may only be the beginning.
University researchers are testing robots that help take care of older people, keep them company — and even give them sponge baths. Meanwhile, some younger people have taken to collecting information on their own, often going to extremes to document exercise routines, caffeine intake and the like and posting the data online.
Jeff Kaye, director of the Oregon Center for Aging & Technology, said this monitored-all-the-time life will become the norm for older people in the United States within five years, and will be common for people of all ages soon after.
His lab has been conducting research on the benefits of monitoring people all the time, and they have early indications that doctors may be able to spot early Alzheimer’s, dementia and indicators a person is susceptible to falls by monitoring their daily lives.
While the technology is basically ready to go now, he said, researchers haven’t had enough time to figure out how these systems will work most effectively. Crunching the data can be challenging, and the number of things we can monitor needs to be increased for these systems to provide more valuable info.
“The temperature you sleep at, the particulate matter in the air, the ambient light your body experiences … drastically can change your physiology, and we are barely aware of it,” he said.
The idea of monitoring older people is catching on slowly, and there are several reasons for this.
Part of the hold-up is a lack of research. While tech researchers and health care experts have a general sense that more monitoring must be a good thing for spotting health trends and preventing accidents, there’s little formal research to prove this.
Companies that make these systems are also scarce.
Only a few boutique companies in the United States sell these types of monitoring systems for home use, experts said in interviews, although Intel and GE are set to announce a partnership such systems in January, GE Healthcare’s Jim Pursley said.
Some complain that the monitoring systems are too expensive for many people.
Hall’s system in Columbia, South Carolina, cost $5,500 to install, he said. Others pay monthly fees for monitoring services, kind of like a cable TV payment model.
Bob Jennings, who lives 45 minutes down the road from Hall in Orangeburg, South Carolina, said he pays $300 to $400 per month for a system to monitor his parents’ home, which is about a mile down the street from his house.
That’s cheaper than a nursing home, and it brings him peace of mind, he said.
There are also ethical issues with monitoring people as they age.
Jennings, 49, said he made a pact with his dad to let him stay in his house — which he’s lived in for more than 40 years — as long as possible. Jennings didn’t feel safe about that arrangement without placing a network of monitors in the home.
Bob Jennings’ dad, Robert Jennings, now 86, didn’t take to the idea kindly.
“I don’t need that damn thing,” Bob Jennings recalls his dad saying.
But if it meant he could stay in his house, he would agree to it.
The younger Jennings said the system has proven useful.
Until recently, Robert Jennings lived in his large house with his wife, who has Alzheimer’s and has since moved to an assisted living center. Before she moved to the center, Bob Jennings worried his mother would become disoriented and wander out of the house. He used a GrandCare network of sensors to track her and notify him if she broke from normal routine.
If she was out of bed for more than 10 minutes in the middle of the night, for example, he would get a call. And if she opened a door to the backyard, where there’s a swimming pool, he would get a call on his mobile phone, work phone and home phone.
One night he got that call, and rushed to the house to find his mother fiddling with a latch that kept her out of the backyard.
“She could have walked right out there and fell in the swimming pool,” he said.
Jennings said his dad has been able to stay in the home at least two years longer than he otherwise would have because of the monitoring system.
But it’s not clear Robert Jennings understands the system.
His son had the sensors installed while his dad was out of the house so that he wouldn’t worry. The 86-year-old users a touch-screen monitor that controls the system from the kitchen mostly to look at photos of his family members. Pictures of granddaughters in cheerleader outfits and his grandson on hunting trips flash across the screen while he eats breakfast.
The AARP supports these monitoring systems as a way for people to “age in place,” but the group says adult children should have serious conversations with their parents about why they’re interested in a monitoring system and the possible benefits.
“Conversations should be taking place early and often,” said Elinor Ginzler, AARP’s senior vice president for livable communities.
Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for privacy online, said rules need to be developed to ensure the personal data from these monitoring systems is protected.
“When data is being held by a third party, that also means it’s susceptible to being subpoenaed by your insurance company or accessible perhaps by your employer or law enforcement or the IRS,” he said. “Everyone can make up their own idea of who they wouldn’t want to know all the things that the 24-7 record of the movement inside your home — connected with monitoring devices — would tell you.”
Robert Jennings said he wants to do whatever he can to stay in his home.
“It’s where I spent most of my time with my wife and raised my children,” he said. Nearly every inch of available wall space in the home is covered with portraits of family members and pets.
Hall is a rare case in that he chose to install a system to monitor himself. Without it, he said, he would have to leave his home, which is stuffed full of beloved items he’s collected over the years — from porcelain birds to Chinese furniture and nude statues.
A tiny dog named Precious tails him everywhere he goes in the house.
But Hall likes knowing someone else is watching, too.
“It is the most secure feeling,” he said.

Direct link to CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/11/19/sensors.aging/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Baby boomers use technology to keep an eye on Mom and Dad

An Article featuring GrandCare from the Toronto Star
September 10, 2010
Susan Pigg
LIVING REPORTER

Olive Howe had barely unpacked from her July vacation when her daughter called with a pressing personal question.

“Are you okay Mom? Because you’ve gained five pounds in the last two days?”

It has been hard for the 81-year-old South Carolina great grandmother to get away with much the last two years, since her daughter started monitoring her every move, blood-pressure blip and weight fluctuation via computer from her home five kilometres away.

“I just laughed. It doesn’t bother me. It’s a comfort knowing that if anything happens to me, or I have a fall, someone will know,” says Howe. “I do not want to go to a nursing home.”

Howe has heart problems. She needs to take her medication and watch what she eats. When she doesn’t, her daughter Sandra Pierce knows almost immediately via email or phone alerts, thanks to the remote monitoring technology GrandCare Systems.

It’s coming to Ontario soon, and just one of a fast-growing number of technologies turning the tables on the traditional parent-child relationship. Suddenly, aging parents who spent decades trying to keep on top of their kids are finding they’re the ones being watched — from across town or across the country.

Over the coming months a raft of new-and-improved remote monitoring devices will hit the market, from GPS shoes that can track the whereabouts of wandering seniors to MedCottages, portable RV-like units equipped with motion and monitoring systems that allow seniors to maintain some independence from the backyard of their adult childrens’ homes.

“As we age, this is going to be a growing trend,” says Laurie Orlov, a Florida-based expert on so-called “aging-in-place technology” aimed at keeping seniors in their houses and out of nursing homes as long as possible.

“We have to get past the fear and antagonism among the older people who need it the most. I don’t think they’re that technology-ready, but the boomers, who are their adult children, certainly are.”

Motion sensors strategically placed in the three-bedroom home where Howe has lived for 53 years feed information right to her daughter’s laptop, detailing when she got out of bed (the Friday we chatted it was 9 a.m.), walked into the bathroom (9:15 a.m.) or hovered at the kitchen table where she keeps her pills (9:30 a.m.)

Even her blood-pressure reading (165/76) is fed to her daughter’s computer, along with her daily weigh-in tally, providing a detailed graph which she often takes to her doctor appointments.

The only thing GrandCare can’t tell Pierce, because her system doesn’t include cameras, is if her mother actually swallowed her pills.

“She can’t have a bit of fun,” jokes Pierce, 59, whose mother explained her sudden weight gain by confessing to indulging in too many roasted nuts and slices of red velvet cake on vacation.

“I have the capability of going online and watching every move she makes, but I don’t typically do that. My mother is very independent and always says she doesn’t want to be a burden on anyone,” says Pierce.

Monitoring and in-home help technologies will be a $20 billion U.S. business in North America by 2020, predicts Orlov, founder of Aging In Place Technology Watch.

Already some baby boomers are able to remotely lock their parents’ doors, track calls coming into their homes and even see who is ringing the doorbell, in many cases right from their smart phones.

Systems such as QuietCare, WellAWARE, FineThanx and SimplyHome are already fixtures in some U.S. homes and seniors’ communities, although Orlov estimates fewer than 10,000 units are in active use because the systems can be so costly.

Next month, Paul Whyte, a Markham dealer of smart-home technology that allows ordinary electronics and appliances to communicate with each other, will unveil the GrandCare system at the Zoomer show in Toronto.

“I call it the invisible caregiver,” says Whyte of Cybernetics Systems Inc. “The minute I saw this system I thought, ‘There’s something that actually makes sense.’

Howe loves the system for another reason. She doesn’t use a computer, but GrandCare enables her relatives to fire off messages and photographs which come up on its large monitor (some versions of the system also plug into the TV.)

The system not only lights the way to the bathroom when Howe gets up in the middle of night, it alerts her daughter if, as happened recently, there was unusual activity in the house: A visiting relative was pacing late at night.

But all these systems remain so cutting edge, they’re intimidatingly costly and complicated, says Orlov.

“We’re not talking about something you just pick off the shelf, run home and plug in.”

GrandCare Systems, for instance, can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $9,000, depending on the level of service, plus there’s a monthly monitoring fee of $50.

Whyte plans to rent out the units for roughly $125 to $350 per month.

Virginia Wesleyan minister Kenneth Dupin has gone one step further with MEDCottages, portable units — some have dubbed them “Granny pods” or “hospital room in your backyard” — that allow seniors to be plunked for as long as needed in their adult children’s backyard.

Dupin refers to the controversial innovation as “family managed care” that he believes could become a key alternative to the overwhelmed and costly nursing home system. (In Ontario alone, for instance, there are 76,000 nursing home beds but 24,000 people on the waiting list.)

The State of Virginia has passed a law allowing installation of MEDCottages in residential backyards, over the objections of local homeowners who have already expressed fears they don’t belong in neighbourhoods.

The key, of course, with all these technologies is that the senior be relatively able-bodied and sound of mind — most are of limited value if the senior is suffering from dementia, which is expected to become a major public health issue in the next few decades.

But developers are also working hard on that challenging front.

Sometime later this fall or next spring the first GPS-equipped shoe, the Aetrex Ambulator, will go on sale through www.gpsshoe.com or www.foot.com.

Originally designed for children by Los Angeles-based GTX Corp., the new shoes are expected to retail for about $250 U.S. They enable caregivers to track those afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s thanks to GPS and cellular technology that will relay their whereabouts back to a monitoring centre.

“Privacy may be a talking point, but it’s not really an issue,” says Patrick Bertagna, chairman and CEO of GTX Corp.

MEDCottage creator Dupin expects concerns around privacy will fade quickly as families and health-care systems here and in the U.S. become overwhelmed by aging baby boomers — more than 76 million in the U.S., 10 million in Canada — who start hitting 65 next year.

“I see remote monitoring becoming an integral part of health care as we all age,” says Dupin. “One of the issues around aging in place is going to be making trade-offs. Privacy may be something we have to give up.”

Susan Pigg focuses on issues about aging and baby boomers.spigg@thestar.ca