Implementing AI for Seniors

Statisticians are astounded by the massive growth of the aging populations around the world. Over the next 50 years, in the US, adults over 65 are expected to grow by more than half. Experts are worried about the pressure this will put on healthcare resources, especially family caregivers and home healthcare workers. How can artificial intelligence (AI) help the aging population?

AI as the Saving Grace of Problems in Elderly Care

 

Compared to other industries, technology was late to impact the senior care sector. Businesses have been running on artificial intelligence for close to a decade now, leveraging automation and precision to solve critical challenges and drive efficiencies. 

Nonetheless, today artificial intelligence is rapidly finding use in every step of the elderly care pathway. Caregivers and health experts are confidently offloading parts of the senior care pathways to artificial intelligence, enabling better care in the elderly’s home. Key advantages include improvements in care quality and impactful resolution of care staff shortages.

Today’s agetech industry presents diverse, innovative solutions that enable seniors to confidently age in place and enjoy the comfort and independence that comes with precise and timely caregiver support. The time is ripe for revolutionizing senior care and improving the quality of life of the elderly. Below is an overview of the leading solutions that leverage AI and machine learning to improve the elderly’s well-being and quality of life.

Intuition Robotics 

 

Intuition Robotics is changing the way AI is currently woven into our daily lives (virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri) by exploring the potential of virtual companions. The company has launched groundbreaking deep learning-based digital companions capable of multimodal interactions and boasting context-aware interactive characters. Intuition Robotics is powered by the company’s AI engine Q. 

This technology can be a terrific boon to the home care sector, promising intelligent companionship and engagement for the elderly living alone. Intuition Robotics uses Q in its products and also leases it to third-party device manufacturers.

MyndYou 

 

MyndYou is an AI platform that offers comprehensive solutions for maintaining cognitive abilities among older adults. The platform finds use in passive monitoring, advanced cognitive assessment methodologies, and AI-generated practical insights. The primary focus of the solution is enhancing the quality of life of seniors living with cognitive impairment, including Alzheimer’s and dementia, by empowering them to maintain their mental aptness and live independently for longer.

Fujitsu 

 

Fujitsu is one of the companies making ripples with AI-driven “aging in place” solutions. The company’s better-living platform is a holistic gerontechnology solution that combines the power of AI, 5G, and IoT in health care monitoring and remote consultation.

Caregivers looking to improve in-home care quality can leverage the Fujitsu gerontechnology to strengthen connections and create better environments for seniors at home. The AI-based platform delivers audio analysis capabilities to detect the health status of patients. Further, the platform empowers medical experts to remotely monitor the health of their elderly patients, which reduces the need for in-person clinical visits.

Amazon Alexa

 

Alexa, the world-famous virtual assistant, has received a makeover as a senior care living solution. Amazon recently launched Care Hub, an Alexa add-on that turns the mobile app into a solution that can help family members and home care providers keep an eye on the elderly.

Caregivers and family members using the platform receive instant alerts when the senior loved one calls for help. Care Hub may be a practical solution for caregivers to stay in touch with the needs of seniors to help them age in place safely and comfortably. CareHub is just one of the many solutions optimizing virtual assistants and transforming them into virtual nurses and virtual caregivers for seniors that prefer to age at home.

Samsung 

 

Samsung has many elderly care solutions designed to improve connections between seniors and friends and family. The impact has been significant in reducing the risk of loneliness among older adults that choose to age in place, with tangible results in the quality of life and better health physically and mentally. 

The technology company further provides plug-and-play monitoring devices that seamlessly integrate into the elderly’s lives to provide healthcare alerts that route to caregivers and enhance the senior’s lives with daily tracking of metrics for care optimization.

Essence Smart Care 

 

Essence SmartCare from Essence Group enables innovative preventative care for seniors and emergency responses that make it possible for the elderly to live a full and healthy life. In-home care agents can use Essence Smartcare to stay in touch with the needs of older adults under their care and empower them to live independently for longer.

Through intelligent sensors and radar-based monitoring solutions, Essence SmartCare can be instrumental in preventing falls and reducing other health and safety-related emergencies for seniors at home.

BrainQ Technologies 

 

BrainQ is building a groundbreaking platform promoting neurorecovery through neurology therapies to help patients suffering from neuro disorders. The Brain-Computer Interface technology delivers noninvasive therapies that leverage cloud technology designed for portability and high-level patient-centricity. The platform maps brain network activities using machine learning algorithms to identify biological insights that empower precision therapy. The treatment is then delivered via a portable device that emits a low-intensity and finely tuned electromagnetic field. For the elderly care industry, BrainQ’s solution creates the potential for improved home-based recovery among stroke patients and speeds up returning to everyday life.

Sensi.AI 

Sensi is the world’s first and only care quality management platform for home care agencies and senior care communities. The company focuses on leveraging audio analytics-based AI to set a higher standard of care in long-term care settings. This enables care providers to offer 24/7 services, despite the massive shortage of caregivers and regardless of any patient’s financial capacity to afford round-the-clock care. 

Upon first connection, Sensi ‘learns’ the environment to set a baseline, detecting and analyzing any sound in the environment (running water, door shutting, specific people, tv sounds, cleaning activates, etc.). Once the baseline is set, any anomalies (such as cognitive or physical decline, mental distress, unmatched routine schedule, etc.) are automatically detected and alerted. This helps agencies enhance the positives (recognizing caregivers for a good job, optimizing care hours, etc.) and prevent the negatives (unqualified caregiver matching for specific needs, mental distress, etc.), thus empowering care agencies to constantly improve the quality of care.

Since each environment is different, dozens of parameters can affect the collection of data – a building’s structure, the location of devices, acoustics, surrounding noisy elements, inputting hardware, and many more. These contribute to one of the biggest challenges in characterizing the data in a scalable manner. We resolve this challenge by collecting data elements with as wide of a variety as possible, which we train our models to read, creating broader data sets. The system automatically aligns between similarly sounding environments and sets the baseline accordingly to avoid a separate classifier for each environment. 

With so many interactions pointing to the same anomaly and to obtain higher accuracy rates – the system has personal identification (speaking), cross-references sound, and NLP  – bringing it closer to ‘understanding’ the full scope of the interaction and defining the anomaly. This results in an F1 Score above 90. 

The ability to set prediction patterns helps agencies prevent unwanted events from occurring, such as predicting fall risks to ensuring specific needs are met by properly trained staff members.

Conclusion 

 

With the rapidly greying population and increased pressure on in-home care, industry players need solutions that can help deliver better care, stay in touch with the needs of seniors, and solve the caregiver staffing crisis. The thriving agetech market has plenty to offer when it comes to providing feasible solutions to these problems to help older adults age with the confidence and dignity they deserve. 

 

This post was written by Nevo Elmalem, Co-Founder & CTO at Sensi.AI. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and visit their website to learn more.