San Francisco – Talking pill bottles that remind you to take your medicine. A wristwatch that can help find a wandering Alzheimer’s patient. Smart Band-Aids that check your temperature and heartbeat. Sensors in bedsheets that monitor sleep apnea and snoring.
Motion detectors on doors and furniture that sense when you’re up and about, when you stay in bed, and whether you’ve fallen. Robots that help disabled people get up from a chair and walk down the hall.
They sound like sci-fi, or entries from a Sharper Image catalog, circa 2015, but they’re technologies that exist today.
With America’s population rapidly aging, electronic devices to monitor seniors’ health and well-being at home are a growing new sector. A few are on the market now; more may hit the U.S. as soon as next year.
“We have the potential to aim our innovation engine at the age-wave challenge and change the way we do health care from a crisis-driven, assembly-line, hospital approach to a personal-driven approach,” said Eric Dishman, director of health research and innovation for Intel in Santa Clara, Calif.
The computer-chip giant takes the market niche so seriously that when it reorganized in January, it created a digital health group as one of its five primary business units.
“Intel went down this path after a study of 300 households in the United States, South America and Europe, where we sent social scientists out to live with and observe them,” Dishman said.
“We ostensibly focused on digital entertainment, but the overwhelming response by anyone over 40 was, ‘I don’t need 500 more TV channels; I need a way to manage my diabetes, and more importantly, to manage the diabetes of my aging parents.’ We heard that so many times, we said: ‘We need to start a lab to focus on personal health trends.”‘
Now, Dishman leads that lab in Portland, Ore.
“We study the needs of seniors and boomers to figure out how all the gear we’re putting into people’s lives for digital entertainment can be used for health and wellness,” he said.
Although Intel will stick to its mission of building the chips that power products, rather than getting into product development itself, the lab has created a number of proof-of-concept devices.
For example, there’s a “Caller ID on steroids” for people with memory loss who have become “afraid to answer the phone because they wouldn’t know the difference between their own daughter and a stranger calling them,” Dishman said.
When the phone rings, a screen shows a photograph of the person calling, their name and relationship, and a short summary of a previous conversation.
Like the amped-up Caller ID, many senior tech products are built upon existing devices.
That makes them easier for consumers to use, since they’re simply extensions of familiar gadgets.
Cellphones, for example, are the basis for a host of ideas for future products, as well as some available now in Europe and Japan.
