By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and co founder
Interesting article about telehealth shows that digitial divide between seniors and younger generations is a barrier in telehealth. Read more here. From this article: Blacker (AT&T) said lack of access to technology is a problem, especially among the elderly. “The ‘digital divide’ is a big problem because senior… citizens are the
group that is least likely to use digital technology,” West said.
It’s FamiliLink’s mission to overcome the digital divide!
By Inger Rarick, VP of marketing and co-founder FamiliLink
It is well documented that older adults are more likely to experience loneliness than any other demographic group and therefore suffer a number of different negative health and medical effects as a result. One of the most eye-opening studies show that seniors who described themselves as lonely were twice as likely to develop Alzheimer-type dementia. Other studies have shown with loneliness also comes increased incidences of depression, heart disease, and stroke.
Of course, feeling alone is understandable as older adults who may have once lived very busy lives working, raising children, volunteering in the community, etc later have their children grow up and move away, retire from their jobs, have decrease in mobility, and may experience a death of a spouse. As we get older, our social circle becomes more limited, making social engagement more and more challenging. However, loneliness and being alone are two very different things.
In the studies, seniors who said in general they “felt lonely” were not necessarily spending more time “alone” than the group who said they did not generally feel lonely. So feeling lonely has little to do with the actual time you spend alone. Loneliness has more to do with your “social connection” you feel with your loved ones.
This is where the internet can be invaluable to the health and social well-being of older adults. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project surveys taken from 2006-2008 show that older generations are online now more than ever before with email being their most popular online activity. The reason they say they use the Internet and email, is so they can stay “connected” with their family and friends. Recent studies even show how internet use in older adults improves their well-being. Well this is a no brainer…if you are socially engaged and connected, you will feel less lonely and you will therefore have a better chance of avoiding age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart conditions, and more.
At FamiliLink, we believe social engagement and feeling socially connected to the ones you love is KEY to living a vibrant and happy life. Using a service like FamiliLink makes it easy for family to include older adults in the digital family experience while also making it fun and simple for older adults to feel included in the family loop.
By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and Co-founder FamiliLink
With families becoming smaller and living more dispersed finding easy ways to stay in touch becomes increasingly more important. Grandparents living far away from their grandchildren can feel lonely and disconnected from their loved ones. Today, caring family members are looking for solutions to easily connect and share their digital lives with their older loved ones. Remember the time when people use to print all their photos and make actual physical photo albums? Then it was easy to print “doubles” and have the extra photos dropped in the mail and sent to loved ones. Today, people’s lives are being captured digitally and online photo albums are becoming the “norm”. Digital photos and videos are easy and fun to share with more tech savvy family and friends, but this creates an even greater divide and disconnect with our older loved ones who are more technology challenged.
Families are trying a number of solutions to help their older loved ones stay connected, including digital picture frames and email…with little success. The frames require too much work to upload images at a special website. Older adults continue to struggle with email. (Studies show that seniors have twice as hard a time as their younger counterparts using the computer.) Research shows this to be a huge problem for millions of families. Of course there is always the phone and snail mail but everyone is becoming more and more digital. Fortunately seniors are increasingly going online and adopting email as a way to stay in touch with their loved ones. A recent article stated that in 2000, fewer than 20% of Americans older than 64 could access the Internet, but today 37% of Americans older than 64 are online. This is an 85% increase in just eight years. From the same article some other interesting facts:
Time to look into what the internet has to offer grandparents who want to stay in touch. Email is an obvious solution; others are webcam, instant messenger, Skype and online sharing sites like Kodakgallery, Flickr, Shutterfly and even Facebook. These are all valuable but have some disadvantages for both the tech savvy user and the more technology challenged grandparent. These disadvantages include:
FamiliLink fulfills this need by aggregating family content for the grandparent at one place with a very simple to use interface. Grandchildren can send photos as an attachment to the grandparent’s FamiliLink email address and the photos will automatically display at their FamiliLink page. The grandparent can easily enlarge the photos received, forward them to others and view them as a slide show.
So far the ability to view photos and also videos at one place definitely has proven one of the killer apps for FamiliLink users together with just simply having all social content of people that matter most conveniently aggregated at one place. No need to follow complicated links or download attachments.
By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and Co Founder FamiliLink
You hear and read more and more about people trying to find ways to keep an elderly parent living independently in their own home, trying to postpone the perhaps necessary move into a retirement community or assisted living facility when heir health may deteriorate while also trying to avoid scary (not too mention expensive) trips to the emergency room. The benefits of living longer independently is not only to avoid the substantial increase in monthly costs if a move to assisted living becomes necessary but also, like many of us, we want to stay independent as long as possible.
There are various companies out there that provide advanced sensor systems for adult children to track the activities of the aging loved one and alert them when there has been an important change in behavior. One of those companies is Quietcare. Quietcare lets the adult children also login to a webpage where they can get more information on their aging loved one. See an example here
The child will also receive phone alerts from QuietCare emergency response operators and notification emails if values are not within the normal range. Last week an article in the New York Times covered this specific topic as well. Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13senior.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
The article gives a good example of an elderly woman , Berta 78 years old who fell from the bed and didn’t have within reach their personal alert system like Lifeline Alert Systems from Philips offers. The sensor under the bed part of the system provided by eNeighbor detected that Berta had gotten up but other motion detectors in the bedroom and bathroom registered no motion, which prompted a security call to her. When that call wasn’t answered, the alert system was set in motion and within an hour additional help arrived.
Technologies like eNeighbor come with the possibility of increased care at lower cost and with the backing of large companies like Intel and General Electric.
But there are also some disadvantages with it. One of the disadvantages is the idea that big brother is watching you in your own private setting, what is left for yourself if sensors register all your activities. Or the feeling that your children are following all your moves in your own home? As a daughter of an aging mother living alone, I personally wouldn’t like the idea of following my mother’s moves on the computer. To me it seems like she is perhaps in an observation facility being constantly watched and monitored. While it helps me feel better knowing she is safer, there is a price to pay…her privacy and self-dignity are at stake. So probably there is a balance between how concerned you are and how much you want to compromise your privacy. The same applies to personal alert systems like Lifeline Alert. To give my mother an alert pendant around her neck would feel to me like I was labeling her in some negative way, however if the risk of falling or other issues increases this may be the price we are both willing to pay.
It would be nice if someone could develop a less intrusive solution that keeps these privacy and self-dignity aspects in mind.
Getting back to FamiliLink, as part of our service we offer an urgent message alert feature: With the touch of one button an elderly user can send a pre-set urgent message to a group of pre-selected people (such as an adult child, neighbor, or nurse). The message will be sent to their email and in the near future the same message will also be sent to their cell phone. This is not a complete solution but it will help in feeling more secure and safe and will provide some peace of mind to the family. In the near future we will introduce other safety related features as indeed the technology is available and we can leverage modern communication technologies.
By Laura Nuhaan, Co-Founder and CEO FamiliLink
We started this blog to share our experiences in building a company from scratch and how seniors use the internet and computers. We also like to keep you updated on our services and progress along the road.
Inger Rarick (linkedin profile) and I (http://www.linkedin.com/in/lauranuhaan) started this company in the summer of 2007 as we both felt a strong drive to solve the need to include our older loved ones in the increasingly complicated digital family loop. Not only driven by our own parents who were frustrated when they couldn’t see the latest photos or videos posted on Flickr, Picasa but also from both our working experience. Prior to FamiliLink I worked with a Tele Monitoring company where a few things became very clear to me. First of all there are many people out there that need to take care of their aging parent. It’s estimated that 34 million Americans serve as unpaid caregivers for other adults, usually elderly relatives, and that they spend an average 21 hours a week helping out, according to a study being released by AARP . Millions more grown children are calling regularly, flying into town every few weeks or months or just stopping by to take Mom or Dad to the doctor. ( For the whole article click here). I learned that Tele Monitoring of elderly patients often didn’t include family members were often in the communications. There was no social “hook” to help keep the elderly patients interested. Probably contribution to the fact that Tele Monitoring till today still has not been widely implemented. Inger has worked directly with seniors and their families in a variety of health care settings where she has seen firsthand the physical and psychological effects loneliness has on seniors. Study results have shown that seniors who feel lonely have 50 % greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease, depression and heart disease.
After intensive research and usability studies with seniors and family members we recently launched our alpha site where we are offering a single place for seniors to easily stay in touch with their friends and family while allowing family members to use their preferred forms of online communications to stay in touch.
One of the misunderstandings we frequently encounter is that younger generations often assume that seniors use the internet and computers the same way as they do. This is absolutely not true. Studies show that seniors have twice as hard a time using the internet (link to fact). Plus age-related conditions prevent seniors from using computers the way they use it. Just as a person who ages sometimes needs a cane or special assistance, why would a senior not have special needs as it relates to the computer?
We asked LinkedIn contacts the following: What are the problems your parents or grand parents experience when using the computer or internet? This is one illustrative answer we got from Poland:
well, consider my family - father, 70, mother 68.
My mother wouldn’t go near a PC - she thinks it’s absolutely useless to her, just like Full HD TV with 500 channels. My father has a PC and uses it, although he would need everything explained in very different way I would ie. instead of just a windows with the command browse or upload - the instructions would need to be something like if you want to upload a picture, you need to click here, go to a directory on you hard drive (the thing you keep your files on), select the image you want to upload, click ok, click upload, wait a while until it uploads, then enjoy. Or even better - put images in the instructions. Also the older generation tends to click yes on every popup they see, whether it’s harmless or harmful. They don’t use any plugins, any ad-blockers etc.
More answers from others at
http://www.linkedin.com/mbox?displayQuestionsReceived=&trk=hb_side_qa
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