Presented at this year’s SilversSummit @ CES was the National Alliance for Caregiving and UnitedHealthcare’s joint study, The e-Connected Family Caregiver: Bringing Caregiving into the 21st Century. In the US, family caregivers provide an estimated $375 billion of uncompensated care, and as of now, relatively few, other than online researching and support, use telehealth in even its most basic form, online or mobile trackers or calendars. The most desirable: PHR tracking, caregiving coordination (a shared log) and medication support/dispensing. For telehealth monitoring, as well as telemedicine/online consults and smartphone caregiving applications, interest is high (60-70%) but over half perceive it as high cost and likely not to be accepted by the older person. Even with tradeoffs of time and stress, these continue to be serious holdbacks, which should not surprise developers. Information Week Healthcare. National Alliance website (links to whitepaper, factsheet and press release).
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Elder’s acceptance of caregiving technology
The prevailing view that elders will not accept caregiving technology
is a flame being fanned by the lack of success of the efforts of thosewho have little or no knowledge or experience providing products or services to them.
If we as an industry fail to demonstrate to the elder why there is value for them in these products, of course they won’t want to use them.
Perhaps we should be looking at the seller’s lack of ability to demonstrate the value so they can make the sale, rather than the usual reaction
of blaming the failure on someone else, the elders.