Remote Monitoring and Digital Health

If you haven’t already, I imagine many of you are currently or will soon be dealing with aging parents and their desire to stay in their home for as long as possible. And why wouldn’t they? That’s what we would want for ourselves. So how to balance that with knowing when assistance might be necessary? A daily phone call to check in might be annoying for the parent and take the joy out of a genuine conversation for anyone.Alfred Poor is the editor and publisher of HealthTech Insider. We had a conversation about what the future might look like for fulfilling those wishes and feeling confident about being able to help when necessary.An Alexa device can already be handy for reminding people to take their medication or exercise. Alfred is interested in technology that might be able to make assessments based on changes in someone’s voice or the sound of a cough to, if not diagnose, raise an alert. Imagine if the device could detect anxiety or depression. What if that could send a prompt to have you check in with your parent? Loneliness can be a big challenge for anyone, but especially the elderly. The pandemic has affected half to two thirds of adults in terms of mental health. There aren’t enough therapists or health care workers to deal with those numbers. But an app that can suggest breathing exercises, help with a guided meditation or a prompt to get out and go for a walk may reduce the burden for the individual, saving in-person visits for more urgent cases. As with any technology, I worry about the downside. Does relying on digital assistants to help our parents make it easier to forget to call and just say hello? Is that a trend we want to enable, or end up as a “beneficiary” of? What about assistance in the case of a fall? We talked about the wearable pendant with a red button on it. It turns out that no one wants to wear that. And only in 7% of cases where it could be used does the wearer actually press the button. The biggest reason to not push the button? “I don’t want my kids to move me out of my home.”What if Alexa could identify a fall and ask if you need help? Alfred described to me how he manages to keep track of his 100-year old mother who lives alone 6 miles from the nearest neighbor. He installed a Smart Water Assistant called Phyn designed to notify you in the case of a water leak. Because it knows which faucet or toilets water is going to, he can “see” that his mom is up in the morning, making dinner, getting ready for bed. etc. Without being invasive, they are both comfortable with the level of monitoring it gives them. When I asked about privacy, Alfred suggested that having all of our health data in one place would be beneficial in terms of individual treatment but also in terms of the opportunity to look at the data and learn from it on a population level. You can listen to the podcast for a detailed example using AI to identify distinct groups of diabetics for whom the outcomes with respect to exercise were significantly different. He makes the point that your credit information can be equally damaging as your health data. But we allow access to it (with qualification) through credit bureaus. It’s an example where the individual owns their data, but it is held somewhere else. What are your thoughts on remote monitoring for keeping track of loved ones’ health? Let me know in the comments. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cclifescience.substack.com