July 1st, 2009
WellAWARE of watching grandma
Working with two of the largest faith-based nursing charities, WellAWARE of Charlottesville, VA has begun delivering on the promise of passive monitoring just weeks after its official launch
That is partly because the company has been in the development and trial for nearly five years, said CEO Jeff Noce. But it’s also because its two key customer-partners can deliver significant market share quite quickly.
At this writing, 60 facilities have the WellAWARE system, company officials told ZDNet. (Note: This actually refers to 60 units in assisted-living facilities, home healthcare and memory care, the company says.)
WellAWARE is offering a system of sensors that track a patient’s movement throughout their residence, comparing their activities to a baseline of normality, and alert caregivers to changes.
Noce explained how this worked recently with an 81 year old client aging-in-place in a Good Samaritan facility in Hastings, NE:
There was an alert that the woman had not slept for 26 hours. The woman was evasive, but we were able to be proactive, and the nurse was able to visit, knowing she hadn’t slept.
The woman finally admitted she’d been hallucinating. The nurse asked about medication, the woman said she had some, and the nurse found that one of the side effects of one medicine was hallucination. She was able to fix the situation in a day.
The patient didn’t have to do anything. The care giver was then able to provide an interaction that got correction.
The Hastings case was detailed at a recent forum sponsored by Volunteers of America, one of the company’s key customers, featuring Newt Gingrich, Tom Daschle, and Donna Brazile. VOA serves over 500 government housing and hospice communitiessenior care facilities, where it believes it can cut costs substantially improve care through WellAWARE and improve care.
The other key customer is the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society, known as Good Sam. Between them the two have a fair share of the faith-based care market. (The other two segments are profit and non-profit care groups.)
From a technical standpoint, the offering features a proprietary wireless sensor array, a SaaS Care Engine that collects and analyzes data from the sensors, and screens for care givers’ mobile devices that offer alerts.
Proprietary sensors were developed, Noce said, so that WellAWARE can run up to 6 months on a battery. Components running on the Zigbee standard are being evaluated, he said, especially as the company prepares to look into active systems that might feature blood pressure or glucose monitoring.
Noce said the company is also buoyed by the pending entry of GE and Intel into the market, believing it will legitimize what WellAWARE is doing.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to ZDNet Healthcare via Email alerts or RSS.
