What Wearable Technology Can Do for the Health of Seniors

What Wearable Technology Can Do for the Health of Seniors

What_Wearable_Technology_Can_Do_for_the_Health_of_Seniors

If you haven’t heard much about “wearable technology” yet, you soon will. As the tech-savvy baby boomers are beginning to reach retirement/elderly status (but don’t tell them!), they are likely to embrace this technology. Briefly, wearable technology is a broad term describing devices that can monitor key health functions; they are typically worn on your body and are intended to enhance the health of seniors by improving their safety and monitoring chronic health conditions remotely so that their physicians can take faster action.

These innovative products offer a number of potential benefits for seniors, their family members and caregivers. For example, if family members don’t live near their elderly loved ones, some of these products can help you to check in on them remotely and assess whether their daily routines have significantly changed. Seniors who use a caregiver, perhaps a family member or a paid health care worker, may see a reduced need for caregiver time with the use of a remote health monitor; this can provide peace of mind to both the caregiver and the care receiver and can help save money on outside caregiving costs. Even within a senior living community, when your loved one wears a sensor, health emergencies may be caught and acted upon sooner.

Here are a few promising wearable technology products:

Cardiac health monitoring

Working with the Mayo Clinic, this company offers an FDA-cleared device intended to monitor non-lethal arrhythmias in ambulatory patients. It helps monitor chronic or at-risk patients using a wearable sensor that collects health data, in real-time. Your loved one wears a discrete bandage-like patch which includes a small battery-operated monitor sensor. This lets mom or dad still have total mobility and enjoy their normal activities without restrictions. Data is delivered securely to a smartphone which in turn wirelessly delivers the data to a cloud-based secure platform for analysis by your loved one’s physician, if needed.

Another company also has a wearable sensor that collects data on your loved one’s heart rate, blood pressure, and amount of sleep. This sensor is also able to transmit the information wirelessly for interpretation by caregivers.

Remote rhythm monitors

A wrist-based sensor is available that comes with interchangeable bands which can monitor the wearer’s activities and movements, using sensors and what the company claims is powerful software that analyses routine rhythm patterns. The goal is to track daily habits such as walking speed, time spent sitting or lying down, and compile it for analysis of deviation in these normal routines. This can benefit the health of seniors by, for example, noting unusual time spent not moving, which could mean that your loved one has fallen. Falls by seniors are common and sometimes deadly; it’s estimated that about one-third of those over 65 years of age fall each year, and the risk of falling increases as we age. At 80 years and older, over half of seniors will fall each year.

Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS)

Several companies market what they call a PERS device, which they claim can provide assistance with the press of a button. One device works with AT&T’s cellular network and includes a call button that will notify a nearby care center if the user has a fall or other health emergency. The device has hands-free voice communication and can even make a phone call if your loved one isn’t able to do so on his or her own.

Would your senior loved one be willing to consider wearable technology?

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