Smart Watches Future in Senior Care
Independent living and assisted living residents at a Minnesota continuing care retirement community (CCRC) will soon strap on Samsung smartwatches and help launch a new tech partnership in the senior care space.
Founded in 2013, Reemo utilizes smartwatches and sensors to gather a variety of health data about senior living residents, and provides that in dashboards to caregivers, family members, and the residents themselves. Now, the company is partnering with Teradata, a major business analytics firm that did $2.5 billion in revenue in 2015 and counts major health systems such as Harvard Pilgrim among its customers. Together, the companies believe they can deliver super-charged analytics and clinical insights about senior populations.
The first provider to test this will be Mission Health, a Florida-based company that manages 32 properties in six states. The Residence at North Ridge, a CCRC in Minneapolis with 150 total units of assisted living and independent living, will be the site for the Reemo/Teradata pilot.
“We’d been chatting with Reemo and were very excited about the wearables, but it was the analytics piece that captured our attention,” Tina Thomas, senior vice president of operations at Mission Health, told Senior Housing News. “It’s a different platform than what we’ve seen.”
The Reemo/Teradata platform gathers data through Samsung Gear S2 smartwatches and some in-unit sensors. The devices capture information such as sleep patterns, number of steps, and heart rate. Taking these raw data points and being able to translate them into clinical insights is where Teradata—with its industrial-scale capabilities and previous work with massive amounts of health data—will be able to help Reemo and providers go the next level, according to Randy Lea, vice president of strategic initiatives at Teradata.
For example, a doctor might tell a heart patient to walk a certain number of steps each day. When the doctor must rely on the patient’s self-reporting about his or her activity between visits, it’s difficult to determine the effectiveness of the care plan and the ideal number of steps to prescribe to maximize heart health. Now, with that data gathered and crunched, those ideal care paths can be defined, Lea said.
Mission Health likely will focus on gathering benchmark data for falls, urinary tract infections, sleeping patterns