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At least in the usa, the elderly are a severely under served community. Predicting an emergency based on observed biometrics would be incredibly useful to many

At least in the usa, the elderly are a severely under served community. Predicting an emergency based on observed biometrics would be incredibly useful to many of them and these sorts of dismissals are exactly why the digital privacy movement has increasingly lost steam with regular people. I'm not contesting that these technologies and services aren't also going to be used for dubious purposes but the idea that they have no social value is a meme for privileged people who earn enough to be dismissive of the potential savings.

lm28469 7y ago
This is at the "think of the children" level of argumentation. Give them an apple watch, it'll do a better job as an emergency device, without compromising everyone's privacy, and at a fraction of the cost.
prostheticvamp 7y ago
> At least in the usa, the elderly are a severely under served community. A statement that requires qualification to be meaningful. Medicare, Medicare HMOs, and Medicare/Medicaid dual coverage add up to giving elders better healthcare coverage than any other demographic in the US.
- hdhsisjd 7y ago
  Rediculous and clearly ignorant, anyone who has experienced a high needs elderly person is going to be aware of the high cost to achieve a comfortable standard of living. There are articles in mainstream newspapers every year about mistreatment of elderly patients in convalescent homes, instances of abuse from family members are common and also known to be under reported as well and the list goes on. What you're arguing relates to cost while entirely sidestepping the topic of if those costs actually produce acceptable outcomes. Lowering costs further empowers the elderly to act in a more agentic fashion.
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    not sure how pervasive biometric monitoring is supposed to address elder abuse, but "elderly are a severely under served community" is perhaps the most historically rootless and wrong-yet-unfalsifiable thing i've read this week. 'bad things happen to some old people' is not contrary evidence and has nothing to do with the medical attention and resources available for the elderly in our society in both absolute and relative terms.
    - hdhsisjd 7y ago
      The example was already given, biometric monitoring could be used to help elderly people who want to maintain their freedom instead of being shoe-horned into a home but it could also be used to decrease staffing costs as well if it can be done in a non-invasive (in the medical sense) fashion. I'm not sure what your grudge against the elderly is or why it's hard to comprehend that as people age their medical needs increase but nothing about this is news to people who work in a field that services older demographics. This whole line of dialogue is a red herring though because, regardless of if you agree or not, the point was that this sort of technology has real use cases that are driven by consumer demand. You can romanticize these experiences all you want but the reason that tech like this finds consumers is because it's meeting real needs. This idea that the populace at large is only okay with data collection because they don't understand it is just a way for privacy advocates to sidestep responsibility for any useful tech that their policies might render impossible.
      - raxxorrax 7y ago
        You could also tag bad cardiological readings for a bad credit score. Elders would really love that. They cannot even hold back with their demand. This is why you hear screams of joy if you mention 5G in homes for the elderly.
  - samatman 7y ago
    Making a throwaway account isn't license to be rude to people. Do better.
- ihunter2839 7y ago
  Falling, and the injuries / changes in quality of life that falling brings, is a serious issue for seniors. https://www.ncoa.org/news/resources-for-reporters/get-the-facts/falls-prevention-facts/ https://www.ncoa.org/news/resources-for-reporters/get-the-fa... A few years ago, I worked for a small startup looking to use wearable devices to detect early changes in gait as a means to effectively deliver early intervention techniques. The science around the topic is solid - there is good research backing which parameters of gait are most predictive and what therapies are most effective for any given scenario. The problem we always encountered was compliance. Customers (senior living facilities, insurance agencies, etc) want to know that the devices are being used. Seniors are notoriously slow to adopt tech, and adding another device to daily life is the last thing most seniors that we spoke to wanted to deal with. We got to interview with YC for this idea but were rejected. Skimming the companies from that batch I later found https://www.totemic.com/ https://www.totemic.com/ They use back-skatter technologies to provide a compliance-free fall monitoring system. After spending two years in the problem space, I knew a superior solution when I saw it.
macawfish 7y ago
My point was that monitoring elderly people will be an early PR justification for mass, omnipresent biometric surveillance. And they'll act like it's some big surprise discovery that they're just now making even though it's been the main plan all along. Plus, why would you need omnipresent biometric surveillance to do what localized monitoring could do just fine? By all means, use local mm wave radar if that's useful, but why impose large area biometric surveillance onto hundreds of millions of people without transparent opportunities for consensus?
- hdhsisjd 7y ago
  And my point was that your comment came off as dismissive towards the topic of the justification. The parallel point was that presenting this sort of dismissal might fly on Hacker News but it's also why mainstream support has been iffy. I'm not arguing that the entire apparatus is good simply because it can service the elderly, I'm arguing that having a dismissive attitude towards these types of micro-issues, like helping the elderly, is why the movement has been losing steam with the general public. The general public has general needs and dismissing services because of lofty abstract principles might make for appealing tech-centric arguments but it totally fails to provide an alternate solution to the original problem. The topic is political in nature and so political desires can't be ignored or else support will wane.
  - soraminazuki 7y ago
    Stating concerns about the ever increasing erosion of our rights is not a dismissal towards the elderly. Or the children. Or victims of crime. Or people living in the fear of terrorism. Or whatever other excuse that's used to justify abuses of power.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Predicting an emergency based on observed biometrics would be incredibly useful to many of them and these sorts of dismissals are exactly why the digital privacy movement has increasingly lost steam with regular people. Nothing about predicting an emergency is incompatible with privacy. It could be done by your own device under your own control without disclosing the data to any third party. The only necessary third party communication would be the call for help, which itself would only happen in an emergency and not under normal conditions. But that isn't how these things are implemented. Instead they typically upload your sensitive personal information to a corporation, which not only has no benefit to you, it commonly gets used against you as they use it to influence your behavior in ways that increase their profits (i.e. increase your costs). Having a high resolution radio thing which is completely under your control can be an interesting feature. Having a high resolution radio thing which is in your living space but under someone else's control is an outrageous privacy violation that most people would strongly object to if they understood the implications. Which makes it little surprise that the purveyors prefer that people not understand the implications.

lm28469 7y ago

This is at the "think of the children" level of argumentation. Give them an apple watch, it'll do a better job as an emergency device, without compromising everyone's privacy, and at a fraction of the cost.

prostheticvamp 7y ago

> At least in the usa, the elderly are a severely under served community. A statement that requires qualification to be meaningful. Medicare, Medicare HMOs, and Medicare/Medicaid dual coverage add up to giving elders better healthcare coverage than any other demographic in the US.

hdhsisjd 7y ago
Rediculous and clearly ignorant, anyone who has experienced a high needs elderly person is going to be aware of the high cost to achieve a comfortable standard of living. There are articles in mainstream newspapers every year about mistreatment of elderly patients in convalescent homes, instances of abuse from family members are common and also known to be under reported as well and the list goes on. What you're arguing relates to cost while entirely sidestepping the topic of if those costs actually produce acceptable outcomes. Lowering costs further empowers the elderly to act in a more agentic fashion.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  not sure how pervasive biometric monitoring is supposed to address elder abuse, but "elderly are a severely under served community" is perhaps the most historically rootless and wrong-yet-unfalsifiable thing i've read this week. 'bad things happen to some old people' is not contrary evidence and has nothing to do with the medical attention and resources available for the elderly in our society in both absolute and relative terms.
  - hdhsisjd 7y ago
    The example was already given, biometric monitoring could be used to help elderly people who want to maintain their freedom instead of being shoe-horned into a home but it could also be used to decrease staffing costs as well if it can be done in a non-invasive (in the medical sense) fashion. I'm not sure what your grudge against the elderly is or why it's hard to comprehend that as people age their medical needs increase but nothing about this is news to people who work in a field that services older demographics. This whole line of dialogue is a red herring though because, regardless of if you agree or not, the point was that this sort of technology has real use cases that are driven by consumer demand. You can romanticize these experiences all you want but the reason that tech like this finds consumers is because it's meeting real needs. This idea that the populace at large is only okay with data collection because they don't understand it is just a way for privacy advocates to sidestep responsibility for any useful tech that their policies might render impossible.
    - raxxorrax 7y ago
      You could also tag bad cardiological readings for a bad credit score. Elders would really love that. They cannot even hold back with their demand. This is why you hear screams of joy if you mention 5G in homes for the elderly.
- samatman 7y ago
  Making a throwaway account isn't license to be rude to people. Do better.
ihunter2839 7y ago
Falling, and the injuries / changes in quality of life that falling brings, is a serious issue for seniors. https://www.ncoa.org/news/resources-for-reporters/get-the-facts/falls-prevention-facts/ https://www.ncoa.org/news/resources-for-reporters/get-the-fa... A few years ago, I worked for a small startup looking to use wearable devices to detect early changes in gait as a means to effectively deliver early intervention techniques. The science around the topic is solid - there is good research backing which parameters of gait are most predictive and what therapies are most effective for any given scenario. The problem we always encountered was compliance. Customers (senior living facilities, insurance agencies, etc) want to know that the devices are being used. Seniors are notoriously slow to adopt tech, and adding another device to daily life is the last thing most seniors that we spoke to wanted to deal with. We got to interview with YC for this idea but were rejected. Skimming the companies from that batch I later found https://www.totemic.com/ https://www.totemic.com/ They use back-skatter technologies to provide a compliance-free fall monitoring system. After spending two years in the problem space, I knew a superior solution when I saw it.

macawfish 7y ago

My point was that monitoring elderly people will be an early PR justification for mass, omnipresent biometric surveillance. And they'll act like it's some big surprise discovery that they're just now making even though it's been the main plan all along. Plus, why would you need omnipresent biometric surveillance to do what localized monitoring could do just fine? By all means, use local mm wave radar if that's useful, but why impose large area biometric surveillance onto hundreds of millions of people without transparent opportunities for consensus?

hdhsisjd 7y ago
And my point was that your comment came off as dismissive towards the topic of the justification. The parallel point was that presenting this sort of dismissal might fly on Hacker News but it's also why mainstream support has been iffy. I'm not arguing that the entire apparatus is good simply because it can service the elderly, I'm arguing that having a dismissive attitude towards these types of micro-issues, like helping the elderly, is why the movement has been losing steam with the general public. The general public has general needs and dismissing services because of lofty abstract principles might make for appealing tech-centric arguments but it totally fails to provide an alternate solution to the original problem. The topic is political in nature and so political desires can't be ignored or else support will wane.
- soraminazuki 7y ago
  Stating concerns about the ever increasing erosion of our rights is not a dismissal towards the elderly. Or the children. Or victims of crime. Or people living in the fear of terrorism. Or whatever other excuse that's used to justify abuses of power.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> Predicting an emergency based on observed biometrics would be incredibly useful to many of them and these sorts of dismissals are exactly why the digital privacy movement has increasingly lost steam with regular people. Nothing about predicting an emergency is incompatible with privacy. It could be done by your own device under your own control without disclosing the data to any third party. The only necessary third party communication would be the call for help, which itself would only happen in an emergency and not under normal conditions. But that isn't how these things are implemented. Instead they typically upload your sensitive personal information to a corporation, which not only has no benefit to you, it commonly gets used against you as they use it to influence your behavior in ways that increase their profits (i.e. increase your costs). Having a high resolution radio thing which is completely under your control can be an interesting feature. Having a high resolution radio thing which is in your living space but under someone else's control is an outrageous privacy violation that most people would strongly object to if they understood the implications. Which makes it little surprise that the purveyors prefer that people not understand the implications.