Keeping tabs on a spouse or child can be as easy as giving them the latest smartphone disguised as a gift. But tracking an independent-minded senior is a bit harder. No one wants to be a “helicopter parent” to their parent, but someone has to check that they haven’t fallen over or gone off their meds.
Enter a gadget called Lively that is so simple, even a diehard AOL subscriber can install it. In fact, it doesn’t even require an Internet connection.
Lively consists of a hub that is placed out of the way in the senior’s home, and a series of adhesive sensors, which are handily marked “Refrigerator,” “Kitchen,” “Pillbox 1,” etc.
These record movement — such as doors being opened, or house keys coming and going — and send the data back to the modem-like hub. The hub has a permanent 2G cell connection that sends the data to the person in charge.
Not much activity on the fridge door, for instance? Either Grandma’s dining out a lot, or trouble is afoot. Administrators are alerted by smiley and frowny faces. They can share the data with others (siblings, perhaps) who can access it online on a computer, tablet or smartphone.
Iggy Fanlo, Lively’s CEO and co-founder, told the Post that ease of use was paramount when designing the Lively. (The industrial design is by the same firm that did the Nest thermostat.)
It requires no wiring, no pairing of sensors, and no computer skills by the homeowner.
“One of the first that was installed was by a 91-year-old guy in Florida, and he said it was more for his girlfriend!” says Fanlo.
At Georgia Tech, researchers used just a single sensor on a bathroom door to count the number of times it was opened. They found that with a 20 percent swing up or down, there was a 70 percent probability that a person had a significant health issue.
“In our research, we found we all have pretty distinct patterns — particularly this demographic. We go in the kitchen, take meds, leave the house, use the bathroom, all at certain times,” says Fanlo. Such movements can predict people’s future health pretty strongly.
“We initially wanted bathroom and bedroom sensors, but then realized it would be too Big Brother-ish,” adds Fanlo. “People don’t want video, and they don’t want to have to wear something.”
The social side of aging is a big concern for caregivers. They want their parents to age in place, but it’s hard to know if they are getting out to socialize, especially if their spouse has died. Chronic isolation has been shown to be as dangerous to senior health as smoking.
Lively quite brilliantly goes further than most gadgets and offers the LivelyGram as part of the monthly cost. The LivelyGram is a printed photo book of images and words submitted by the rest of the family via channels such as Facebook and Instagram that seniors might feel excluded from. It arrives twice a month in the regular mail.
Tech author Robin Raskin, who writes about the quantified self and runs the Silvers Summit, an annual conference for and by boomers recently gave a Lively to her 82-year-old mother, a widow who lives in a walk-up co-op in Chelsea.
“She has the GreatCall transponder but has never used it. The Lively seemed like too much monitoring to her, but she’s trying it,” says Raskin. “I now get texts and smiley faces from the hub. I was a bit worried at first as she seemed to be going to the bathroom a lot, but it turned out she’d just got the bathroom and fridge door sensors switched!”
Raskin thinks the technology will allow her mother to live at home longer, in return for a little bit of invasion of privacy. The dashboard lets her three siblings, also in NYC, check up on mom.
“I load my mother’s iPad, I do her Netflix queue… I think seniors are pretty tech-friendly if someone will sit with them and get them started. The Senior Planet Exploration Center at West 25th Street in New York is mobbed with people wanting to learn Photoshop and do their finances online.”
In the future, Lively could add sensors for EKGs, glucose, CO2 and smoke. But for now it’s simply about tracking movement with accelerometers (there’s no GPS involved). Small movements are telling. The way you get out of bed or a chair is a good predictor of health. Swift and fluent, you probably have good muscle tone, bones and balance. Slow and unsteady, you could be heading for a fall.
“Instead of approaching this through fear in the medical, clinical way, we want to approach it from a caring way,” says Fanlo. “We want old people to want a Lively because it shows their friends that their kids care about them.”