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The New York Times ran an article on Feb. 12th, discussing some of the technologies currently in use for home monitoring of seniors, as well as the organizations that employ them. Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, principal investigator for the Technology and Aging Study and executive director of the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology, is interviewed towards the end.
Increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room or nursing homes.
Bertha Branch, 78, discovered the power of a system called eNeighbor when she fell to the floor of her Philadelphia apartment late one night without her emergency alert pendant and could not phone for help.
A wireless sensor under Ms. Branch’s bed detected that she had gotten up. Motion detectors in her bedroom and bathroom registered that she had not left the area in her usual pattern and relayed that information to a central monitoring system, prompting a call to her telephone to ask if she was all right. When she did not answer, that incited more calls — to a neighbor, to the building manager and finally to 911, which dispatched firefighters to break through her door. She had been on the floor less than an hour when they arrived.
To read the whole article, click the link to original article above.