How Smart Home Technology is Redefining Aging in Place

Miriam Allred (00:01.0)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. Today in the lab, we're shaking it up just a bit. I've got a panel of guests that each represent a form of consumer technology for the home, particularly useful for seniors aging at home and their families. As technology improves, AI is making new things possible. Seniors and families are seeking options and caregivers could use the added support.

I think this discussion is timely and relevant for home care companies to learn about what's out there and also what is coming. So today in the lab, I'm joined by three gentlemen. We've got Jim Conti, the VP of sales and marketing at HomeSight by Vantiva. We've got Dr. Shea Gregg, the president and founder at Fall Call, who's also a practicing trauma surgeon. And we've also got David Eby, the founder at Cooktop Safety, who's also a 4x CEO.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here.

Jim (01:00.8)
Thank you.

Shea Gregg, MD (01:01.8)
Thank you.

David Eby (01:02.1)
Thanks for having me.

Miriam Allred (01:03.4)
Let's go ahead and start with some introductions. Let's go with Jim and then David and then Shea Give us just a quick overview of your work history, what led you down this current path, and a little bit about the company and your role.

Jim (01:19.3)
No, absolutely. And thank you for having us today, Miriam. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Jim Conti I've been in technology since paging was the way we communicated. that with my 8-track player was the way we did things back then. And as I progressed through the technology, it went from that to analog, cellular, right, and all the other things that have now come. And technology has always been one of those things. And I have really navigated and kind of

been attracted to the disruptive technologies, ones that are maybe building out new categories, maybe ones that didn't exist or that were greenfield. If it was on Amazon or it had a hundred other vendors, probably wasn't something that we would want to look at. And I think you've started to see technology come up through with the introductions now of smart home, faster speeds for internet, 5G, all these things kind of coming together into this smart home umbrella.

You've seen a lot of progression in the smart home residential. You've seen the migration into smart home, multi-family student housing. Those things have started to take off. We're now these property owners are installing technology to do various things, locked doors, unlocked doors, thermostats, et cetera. And when I had all that and you start to look at all these things coming together, then you looked at the senior living market and realized that it was still very disparate. mean, people are now going to have to

or want to now find ways where they want to live independently. How can we now support that roadmap? There's not going to be enough beds, there's not enough caregivers, and how are we going to start to utilize technology to support this silver tsunami, as they're utilizing some of the things we've done. And I think the home health care providers are the ones that are really starting to look at this as how do I amplify this care experience? So technology coming into

Our parent company, Vantiva, is a technology company. They were formerly Technicolor. So they have a technology background. Now we're bringing that same technology, but it's a little different application when you bring it into senior living than it might be in some of those other verticals. So I know we'll share a little bit that later, but technology into home care is becoming a very big focus.

Miriam Allred (03:28.44)
Fantastic. Thank you, Jim. David, over to you.

David Eby (03:32.1)
Great. Okay. So, I've been doing the sort of technology IT space for a few decades. We'll say a one decade, but, but in the last five or six years, I've spent it into sort of fire suppression and sort of residential fire suppression and was able to, buy into a company that, that, has a different strategy on fire suppression. and more about

and seen that there was a lot of attention to that. And also a lot of attention from the tech side of things. How do we deal with residential fires and wizard? So the strategies that were in place and still are in place are really after the fact. So smoke has to happen, fire has to happen. And then the devices like a smoke detector or a fire extinguisher or sprinklers, they come in always after the fact, after the fire or after the smoke sort of started.

You know, got to the software background with software pals that are, you know, thinking that software will solve all and, and decided to sort of investigate, you know, what could we do to predict and prevent a fire? So that's sort of what we've done. And we've really come up with over the last solid three years is really about cooking being the leading cause of all residential fires. And out of those two.

points is distracted and unattended are the main reasons for that. So how do we then take software and current AI to sort of manage those two points? And so that's what I've sort of been working on. And we're now shipping a product called the CTS Smart Kitchen Sensor. it mounts above your stove, it looks like this. And it detects an unsafe situation. So if you're present, unattended,

if you're about to head into a problem, and, and it will circumvent that problem and, or intervene and turn the stove off and if that you're not there or something like that. So it was really sort of a one year of collecting, cooking the data, creating a data set, building out our machine learning models and really sort of, you know, testing the software. So we've really come up with a revolutionary way to attack and really deliver this predict and prevent technology. So I'm happy to be here and the opportunity to discuss it. Yeah, thank you.

Miriam Allred (06:03.5)
Thanks, David. Interested and excited to hear more from you about what you're building and how things are going. Shea, why don't you introduce yourself?

Shea Gregg, MD (06:12.0)
Sure, so thank you for having me today. I'm actually honored to be surrounded by my partners here. My name is Dr. Shagreg and I am a practicing trauma surgeon. I've been in practice for approaching 18 years at this point. Held many roles, anywhere from like frontliner, which I'm still seeing patients of course in the emergency setting.

In addition, I'm a burn surgeon. So David's solution really speaks to me and I'm also a emergency general surgeon as well. And basically back if you go back to 2015, you know, I started to ask questions. I mean, as a academic surgeon, I always am wondering, you know, how can we do things better? And what I was noticing is that the number one call that we were responding to as trauma surgeons are people over the age of 65 who fall, strike their head on anticoagulation. In fact, that is the number one

trauma activation in the United States and worldwide. So one in four people over the age of 65 fall and we are seeing a lot of them in the trauma bay. And when I started to look around, you know, we've had medical alerts that have been around for 40, 50 years at this point. I noticed that some people wore them but didn't push the button or didn't wear them and I asked them, you know, especially if they were found six hours later.

You know, why, and they have muscle breakdown, kidney problems, the dehydrated, severely dehydrated. Why aren't you using your medical alert? And they said very similar things. They're stigmatizing, they're embarrassing, they make me feel old. And, you know, after you hear that enough, you suddenly get the inspiration to do something. You how can we be better? So enter Apple Watch at that time, and I said, this is the potential future of, you know, safe care on the

A lot of people didn't believe it, know, would people in the older adult age group actually adopt this? And we started to build on it. We built our own fall detection algorithm that could differentiate between, you know, sort of falls from sitting versus standing. And then, because not every fall needs a ambulance, you know, you might just want your caregivers to respond. And then we started to build an entire platform where we partnered with jewelry companies, we partnered with, you know, to make things less stigmatizing. We partnered with law companies to eliminate the fear of forest entry. We partnered with with Ranex, which is a Korean company that has the ability to actually proactively let people know that their loved one is sitting on the side of the bed within a second so they their loved one can actually go into the room and prevent the fall.

And so what originally, and we were the first ones to bring crash detection to the third party monitor, we were the first ones to bring third party monitoring to Apple Watch. What's set out to be build a completely SaaS based half the cost medical alert system, which is really a life safety platform, has now turned into a quest to actually build a proactive platform that will prevent falls as opposed to just be the reactive standard

I fall in and I can't get that button in a box. And that's what fall call really is, the differentiator. And by working with these two partners through integrations and capabilities, I'm beyond excited to potentially integrate these technologies to prevent potentially horrible situations and also engage caregivers a lot more than traditional medical alerts can. So I'm excited to talk more about it. Thank you for having me.

‍