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I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the problems of an aging population: 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices servi

I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the problems of an aging population: 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients 2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area) 3. Personnel management for homecare nursing List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear demographic reasons to build startups in this area and there's going to be a natural onramp of capital & solutions for how to care for a radically older population are going be sorely needed.

TheMerovingian 7y ago
There are a number of companies already starting on this. One in particular that comes to mind is Reliq Tech, which does remote monitoring for patients. Currently they have pilots with native reserves, where doctors are hundreds of kilometres away from their patients.
8ytecoder 7y ago
A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.
- omarchowdhury 7y ago
  LogMeIn, Teamviewer, VNC..?
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  My solution to this is loading them up with iOS and macOS devices, enabling iCloud backup, and having them live near an Apple store for hardware issues. They can click on all the shady links they want, but I haven’t had to field tech support in a long time.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    I've had pretty good experiences with handing them Linux machines (usually openSUSE + Xfce). There's an initial adjustment period as they figure out "okay the orange fox replaces the blue e", but quite a few people I know who made that switch are now at least reasonably productive. Chromebooks are another option here that I've seen be pretty successful, and they have the advantage of being absurdly cheap. The absolute biggest bang for the buck: ad-blockers. Fewer sketchy links to click on, and absolutely nothing to relearn.
  - Ruthette 7y ago
    Seniors minds are less flexible to change so a consistently exact OS with exact functionality is best even it looks out of date to us. I had to hire someone to exactly recreate my mom's desktop and and find and install her 15 yo apps. This kept her going with searches and email for another five years when otherwise she would just have given up. Also in-home tech people who are very, very patient. I'd happily pay $100/hour not to do that.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  This is tough for us too - we were even thinking of buying two iPads connected to their Cloud account, just so whenever they locked themselves out, we could mail them the one we have while they mail us the broken one. The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password. They set one, thinking they are guessing one they've already set, they don't remember it, and they get locked out every time.
  - bcyn 7y ago
    > The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password. I don't think that's true. What iOS version did they experience this on?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ilkan 7y ago
  Same. I got mine a used iphone4 mainly for whatsapp a few years ago and it was hard doing phone support for an 80+ year old. Harder when she can't describe the ux, interfaces aren't standard (back vs cancel vs < vs x), and in modern design few things stand out as tappable/clickable. Remote access would've been fantastic.
SkyPuncher 7y ago
I worked in these spaces for the past few years. Money is the biggest challenge. Elderly who can afford to pay for their care have plenty of options available for all of this. Many elderly (on Medicare or fixed income) simply don't have any money. > 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients Telemedicine and home care services, like Honor, are addressing this. Telemedicine will improve as more technically adept people age. > 2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area) This is purely a monetary issue. The moment Medicare covers these services, they will be used extensively. > 3. Personnel management for homecare nursing This one is part money and part skill. There simply isn't enough money to pay people with homecare skills. The price most people are willing to pay typically falls in the range of a Home Health Aid. There are some great ones, but there are also tons that lack skills, ethics, and compassion for the role. I don't blame them either. Why would you do home health when you can get similar pay working at a factory, warehouse, or, even, fast food.
- el_dev_hell 7y ago
  > I don't blame them either. Why would you do home health when you can get similar pay working at a factory, warehouse, or, even, fast food. My mother was a nurse for years in the aged care sector. The pay for a qualified nurse is actually pretty good (I would still argue it should be higher for the work, but it was well above average). Homecare aids (or AIN/care assistants as they were called here) are paid horribly and treated as expendable (even when the roles are difficult to fill since no one wants to wipe asses and give 89 year old dementia patients bed baths for $18.6 AUD per hour). Most of the care assistants I met were checked out and only there because they had no other option. The combination of minimum wage and high turnover also means you end up with some really horrible people in these roles. I remember hearing multiple stories about care assistants stealing from homes and mistreating patients. If you paid a little better and treated the staff with respect, you wouldn't need to hire the dregs of society to look after the most vulnerable in society.
  - Thorentis 7y ago
    We are at a turning point in society right now because of all the things you address. In the last few decades have seen a rapid shift in the willingness of family members to look after their elderly. There's a few reasons for this, the biggest I think is the ageing population. When your parents need care at 85 years old, and you are 60 looking at retiring soon (or perhaps can't retire and need to work for another 7 years), most people decide they'd rather enjoy the last few years of their "active" life before perhaps even needing care themselves, rather than be "burdened" with caring for parents, relatives, etc. And so it falls either on the state, or on the generational wealth of the elderly to foot the bill and pay for care. Relatives often shoot themselves in the foot though. Their inheritance is being spent on paying somebody to wipe their mum's backside, because they didn't want to look after them themselves. (Unless their parents are on medicare or whatever, in which case there's even less reason for them to care). The only part is just societies disdain and repulsion of sickness, bodily fluids, etc. Centuries ago, if you could live comfortably (not amazingly, but not be in the street), just by showering a few old people and cleaning up poo, you'd have people lining up round the block to do it. Now, the willingness to work (and therefore the salary curve) has inverted, and you need to pay people increasing amounts of money to do what was once considered menial or easy work.
throwaway5752 7y ago
Yes. You can look at US Cellular, of all companies, as one on the "bleeding edge" of part of this trend. You have people aging into a technological world built by kids with hands and fingers that work well, eyes that work well, and little cognitive decline. This industry is garbage for the disabled and old. Just garbage. Trying running a WCAG compliance check on any arbitrary piece of software. For most of you, that means looking up WCAG. For 99%+ of you, you will have trouble even finding tools for the products you work on. Someone will make a lot of money with a much simpler cell phone with a lot of white glove handling of security and OS updates, and just a curated set of apps. Apps designed for these populations and their unique problems (but sensitive to their age related disabilities) will be big, too. edit: for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14748929 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14748929 "Iris recognition as a biometric method after cataract surgery." and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19604439 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19604439 "The use of computer touch-screen technology for the collection of patient-reported outcome data in rheumatoid arthritis: comparison with standardized paper questionnaires"
ctraynor 7y ago
The problem with some of this is product-market-timing fit. There are huge problems to solve that add value. But some of these businesses are very old school. You can't force someone to digitise if they don't want to. There are a lot of barriers to entry, and there can be lengthy sales cycles. Someone will definitely get there and be hugely succesful, I'm just not sure if the time is now or if we'll need to wait years.

TheMerovingian 7y ago

There are a number of companies already starting on this. One in particular that comes to mind is Reliq Tech, which does remote monitoring for patients. Currently they have pilots with native reserves, where doctors are hundreds of kilometres away from their patients.

8ytecoder 7y ago

A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.

omarchowdhury 7y ago
LogMeIn, Teamviewer, VNC..?
lotsofpulp 7y ago
My solution to this is loading them up with iOS and macOS devices, enabling iCloud backup, and having them live near an Apple store for hardware issues. They can click on all the shady links they want, but I haven’t had to field tech support in a long time.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  I've had pretty good experiences with handing them Linux machines (usually openSUSE + Xfce). There's an initial adjustment period as they figure out "okay the orange fox replaces the blue e", but quite a few people I know who made that switch are now at least reasonably productive. Chromebooks are another option here that I've seen be pretty successful, and they have the advantage of being absurdly cheap. The absolute biggest bang for the buck: ad-blockers. Fewer sketchy links to click on, and absolutely nothing to relearn.
- Ruthette 7y ago
  Seniors minds are less flexible to change so a consistently exact OS with exact functionality is best even it looks out of date to us. I had to hire someone to exactly recreate my mom's desktop and and find and install her 15 yo apps. This kept her going with searches and email for another five years when otherwise she would just have given up. Also in-home tech people who are very, very patient. I'd happily pay $100/hour not to do that.
tunesmith 7y ago
This is tough for us too - we were even thinking of buying two iPads connected to their Cloud account, just so whenever they locked themselves out, we could mail them the one we have while they mail us the broken one. The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password. They set one, thinking they are guessing one they've already set, they don't remember it, and they get locked out every time.
- bcyn 7y ago
  > The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password. I don't think that's true. What iOS version did they experience this on?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ilkan 7y ago
Same. I got mine a used iphone4 mainly for whatsapp a few years ago and it was hard doing phone support for an 80+ year old. Harder when she can't describe the ux, interfaces aren't standard (back vs cancel vs < vs x), and in modern design few things stand out as tappable/clickable. Remote access would've been fantastic.

SkyPuncher 7y ago

I worked in these spaces for the past few years. Money is the biggest challenge. Elderly who can afford to pay for their care have plenty of options available for all of this. Many elderly (on Medicare or fixed income) simply don't have any money. > 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients Telemedicine and home care services, like Honor, are addressing this. Telemedicine will improve as more technically adept people age. > 2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area) This is purely a monetary issue. The moment Medicare covers these services, they will be used extensively. > 3. Personnel management for homecare nursing This one is part money and part skill. There simply isn't enough money to pay people with homecare skills. The price most people are willing to pay typically falls in the range of a Home Health Aid. There are some great ones, but there are also tons that lack skills, ethics, and compassion for the role. I don't blame them either. Why would you do home health when you can get similar pay working at a factory, warehouse, or, even, fast food.

el_dev_hell 7y ago
> I don't blame them either. Why would you do home health when you can get similar pay working at a factory, warehouse, or, even, fast food. My mother was a nurse for years in the aged care sector. The pay for a qualified nurse is actually pretty good (I would still argue it should be higher for the work, but it was well above average). Homecare aids (or AIN/care assistants as they were called here) are paid horribly and treated as expendable (even when the roles are difficult to fill since no one wants to wipe asses and give 89 year old dementia patients bed baths for $18.6 AUD per hour). Most of the care assistants I met were checked out and only there because they had no other option. The combination of minimum wage and high turnover also means you end up with some really horrible people in these roles. I remember hearing multiple stories about care assistants stealing from homes and mistreating patients. If you paid a little better and treated the staff with respect, you wouldn't need to hire the dregs of society to look after the most vulnerable in society.
- Thorentis 7y ago
  We are at a turning point in society right now because of all the things you address. In the last few decades have seen a rapid shift in the willingness of family members to look after their elderly. There's a few reasons for this, the biggest I think is the ageing population. When your parents need care at 85 years old, and you are 60 looking at retiring soon (or perhaps can't retire and need to work for another 7 years), most people decide they'd rather enjoy the last few years of their "active" life before perhaps even needing care themselves, rather than be "burdened" with caring for parents, relatives, etc. And so it falls either on the state, or on the generational wealth of the elderly to foot the bill and pay for care. Relatives often shoot themselves in the foot though. Their inheritance is being spent on paying somebody to wipe their mum's backside, because they didn't want to look after them themselves. (Unless their parents are on medicare or whatever, in which case there's even less reason for them to care). The only part is just societies disdain and repulsion of sickness, bodily fluids, etc. Centuries ago, if you could live comfortably (not amazingly, but not be in the street), just by showering a few old people and cleaning up poo, you'd have people lining up round the block to do it. Now, the willingness to work (and therefore the salary curve) has inverted, and you need to pay people increasing amounts of money to do what was once considered menial or easy work.

throwaway5752 7y ago

Yes. You can look at US Cellular, of all companies, as one on the "bleeding edge" of part of this trend. You have people aging into a technological world built by kids with hands and fingers that work well, eyes that work well, and little cognitive decline. This industry is garbage for the disabled and old. Just garbage. Trying running a WCAG compliance check on any arbitrary piece of software. For most of you, that means looking up WCAG. For 99%+ of you, you will have trouble even finding tools for the products you work on. Someone will make a lot of money with a much simpler cell phone with a lot of white glove handling of security and OS updates, and just a curated set of apps. Apps designed for these populations and their unique problems (but sensitive to their age related disabilities) will be big, too. edit: for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14748929 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14748929 "Iris recognition as a biometric method after cataract surgery." and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19604439 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19604439 "The use of computer touch-screen technology for the collection of patient-reported outcome data in rheumatoid arthritis: comparison with standardized paper questionnaires"

ctraynor 7y ago

The problem with some of this is product-market-timing fit. There are huge problems to solve that add value. But some of these businesses are very old school. You can't force someone to digitise if they don't want to. There are a lot of barriers to entry, and there can be lengthy sales cycles. Someone will definitely get there and be hugely succesful, I'm just not sure if the time is now or if we'll need to wait years.