Thinking Beyond the Button: Home Health Care Technology for Older Adults

For many, the golden hour is the magical time just before sunrise and sunset when the sun gives off its most radiant light. In health care, the golden hour is also that extraordinary 60 minutes after a catastrophic event occurs—such as a fall—when a person has the greatest chance of recovery if they receive medical care. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25% of US adults aged 65 years or older fall each year. Falls are also the leading cause of fatal injury among older adults. It is no wonder, then, that falls are one of the biggest worries for older adults.

Technologies Neglect Needs of Older Adults

With an increasing number of older Americans choosing to receive health care at home and the older adult population projected to swell 55% by 2060, they must receive the right health care services as quickly and efficiently as possible. While many consumer health technologies allow individuals to press a button and request emergency care, not all of them meet sufficient quality standards for health care providers and provide appropriate support to older adults who may have diminishing vision and tactile capabilities. According to research, as many as one-fifth of adults over age 60 experience some visual impairment.

Consumer health technologies such as wearables and watches are not designed with the aging adult in mind. Consumer watches, for example, may come loaded with health apps, but they tend to be designed with a younger demographic in mind. They often have complex features, feel flimsy, and raise practical concerns about water damage and irritation to older, fragile skin. Importantly, they can become difficult to operate after a fall when an older adult is experiencing an adrenalin rush or may be terrified or in pain.

Creating a Flawless System

As the pandemic and trends in telehealth drive more older adults to prefer their health care and other related services in their home rather than in a facility, they will need more than a button or a sensor to keep them healthy and safe. It is up to the health care industry—especially organizations developing digital health and connected care solutions for older people living at home—to make this happen by creating fail-safe services and technologies that work every single time. We must build flawless and reliable systems that seamlessly integrate nonintrusive technologies and services.

The good news is that health care already has a strong foundation of innovative technologies and services that allow older individuals to live at home safely and with dignity. For example, the personal emergency response services (PERS) keeps patients safe and independent by allowing individuals to push a button that instantly connects subscribers in their homes with highly trained emergency response operators. Whether they be emergency services, caregivers, family members, or neighbors, someone can assess the situation and send help if needed.

Some PERS devices even can detect a fall and immediately contact an emergency operator. Behind the button is a complex personal emergency response service involving a network of call centers connected to 911 that ensure Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is dispatched to the home when required. These are significant advantages compared to a watch.

PERS has also evolved into a state-of-the-art service that provides early intervention, bridging the gap between patients/caregivers, clinicians, and emergency response. For example, during the pandemic’s peak, PERS systems were able to identify COVID-19 symptoms in older adults and the vulnerable early on. This allowed for interventions before a person’s condition deteriorated and they ended up in the emergency room or the intensive care unit.

PERS: A Springboard for Health and Safety

As more consumer technology companies enter the health care space, it is critical to point out that no single technology solution is enough to deliver optimal care and services to the growing population of older adults at home. There must be a system of integrated technologies and services, including traditional PERS, medication management/adherence solutions, remote patient management (RPM), and a fall detection system that all combine to feed a powerful analytics engine delivering actionable insights, alerts, and risk scoring to caregivers, payers, and care teams.

PERS has become the foundation for this system of bringing more essential technology and services into the home. RPM and hospital-at-home models, for example, build on and integrate with PERS by allowing older adults with chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as more acute illnesses, to receive care at home. These care models use medical-grade wireless devices to transmit vital information to a dashboard and a medical professional who is watching and responding. At the same time, RPM allows clinicians to collect and receive aggregated data from the patient portal and electronic medical records (EMRs), enabling them to monitor results and update care plans for data collection and analytics.

The data is compelling: more people want to stay at home. If we want to help them do so successfully, we must create nonintrusive, supportive technologies in the home that prioritize health and safety, the top two categories on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs human motivation model. The entire chain of events that involves delivering technology, products, and care in the home must work as a unified service. When this occurs, older and vulnerable adults have the best chance of recovering during the golden hour and avoiding facility-based care as they age at home.

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