Age-tech today promises to connect seniors with their families, increase their mental stimulation, deter isolation and keep them safe and healthy.

 

By: Mandy Behbehani 

February 29, 2020

Welcome to technology’s new wave: age-tech — the preferred term for products and experiences aimed at America’s “gray tsunami.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are an estimated 73 million Baby Boomers. And the Census’ 2017 National Population Projections showed that by 2034, seniors 65 years and older will outnumber children under 18.

The tech world is taking note, racing to serve this aging demographic — a group that, until now, has essentially been ignored by the industry. Whether it’s developing products that allow seniors to age in place or live in retirement homes, assisted-living facilities or memory-care centers, this is tech’s next frontier. Age-tech today promises to connect seniors with their families, increase their mental stimulation, deter isolation and keep them safe and healthy.

“With the increased penetration of smart devices into people’s homes, (people) are wanting to see these things in senior living communities,” says Davis Park, executive director of the Center for Innovation and Wellbeing at Front Porch, a Southern California nonprofit that owns Sunny View and nine other senior communities in California. “When they’re looking to establish themselves in a home, they expect the available technology to help support their needs.”

Due in part to its location, Sunny View is heavily invested in tech, using it for everything from live streaming Sunday services from a nearby church to Wii bowling tournaments and programs like Rendever’s virtual reality. And they’re paying for it: The community paid roughly $150,000 to $175,000 for all their tech systems, as well as ongoing rental fees of about $10,000 a month.

“We have post-fall huddles discussing what happened and how it happened and (we think), this person has fallen twice on the corner of the bed, so let’s change the direction and orientation of the bed,” says Therese ten Brinke, director of strategic initiatives at Eskaton, which operates three care centers and a dozen residential facilities in California, including the Trousdale. “And then we see those residents are no longer falling.”

Eskaton partnered with startup K4Connect to integrate smart sensors into apartments using devices such as lights and thermostats. The company rolled out social tablets with the K4Connect app that residents could also use to check the menu, access community announcements and connect with family members, but they didn’t do so well, says ten Brinke. “There was a steep learning curve, and sometimes there were some barriers for someone living with forgetfulness and lack of dexterity.”

When one resident with Parkinson’s disease said he needed to control the sensors with his voice, K4Connect integrated Alexa through its app and now residents can speak their commands.

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Read the full piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, here!

Coming off a strong year of growth in 2019, a Triangle technology solutions company says it expects to be doubling again in 2020.

 

By: Seth Gulledge

Raleigh-based K4Connect has been rapidly expanding for a number of years. Since making its debut in 2015 with $2 million in seed funding, the company has raised more than $27 million.

Its scaling efforts began in large in late 2018, following a $12 million Series B round that positioned it to expand access to its K4 Community platform – which integrates the latest smart home and health technologies into a user interface designed for senior living residents and staff.

At the time of its Series B, the company reported about 13,000 users of its platform.

According to CEO Scott Moody – formerly credited for the TouchID technology bought out by Apple – the K4Connect now reports 29,000 users, well over doubling its business in just over a year.

But Moody says the company is far from being at capacity.

“Frankly, I expect to double again this year,” he says.

 

 

The company declined to disclose exact financial figures, but Moody says its user total “tracks very well” to the growth of the company and its revenue. K4Connect says it currently has 27 customers that use its technology to reach those 29,000 users, most of who are in senior living communities owned by the customers.

Moody says the average user of the company’s technology is an 83-year-old woman.

“This whole idea that older adults don’t like technology is malarkey,” he says. “The fact of the matter is if you design something that provides real utility to their lives, making their lives simpler, healthier and happier, they use it.”

However, Moody says the difficulty of designing something for older users is the primary advantage it has on the market, as well as its ability to sell a product to senior living communities that seldom purchase beyond guideline required technology.

Expanding the company will require the continued hard innovation involved with new technologies, and then getting that technology into the hands of a more evasive customer base.

“We’ve learned how to do three hard things,” Moody says. “We’ve learned how to do the tech, we learned how to serve our members and we learned how to serve our customers.”

Central to the value proposition is turning the popular conveniences of modern technology into utility for older customers. Moody says whereas things like automated lights and thermostats are desirable to most demographics, those features can drastically improve the lives of older adults.

According to internal company data, some 80 percent of its users interact with its platform daily.

“I always tell people, ‘anyone can tell a story, but it’s the tech that makes it real,'” Moody says.

Looking ahead, Moody says the company will likely go back out to market for another raise at the end of this year. In regards to competition, he says the company believes that most of the existing competition is technology that would integrate into its platform, not compete with it.

Moody compares the situation to Apple’s IOS platform encouraging app developers to increase the value of its product.

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Read it in the Triangle Business Journal, here

Our Co-Founder and VP of Advanced Technologies, Jonathan Gould, headed to CES in January for the latest in consumer technologies.

 

By: Jonathan Gould

Co-Founder and VP of Advanced Technologies at K4Connect

 

Lots of tech that is now real…

Overall, CES 2020 felt like one of those years where things we saw in the last two years actually became real. Technology like OLED displays, Artificial Intelligence, and many new Smart Device categories over the last years felt a little undeveloped and futuristic (and generally overpriced if you could even buy them).

This year, those things were ready for primetime and at a much more affordable price. Huge vivid television displays were found in every booth. 3D printing machines were quickly generating intricate models on machines that fit on a desk. VR/AR glasses immerse you into different worlds, letting you ride dinosaurs or climb the pyramids.

But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of dreamers out there. Uber promises soon to give you rides in a self-flying car.

And some things just disappeared…

Looking back at prior years, some ideas haven’t made it. The once-popular idea of a tablet that folds into a phone hasn’t really happened. New ways of devices talking to each other, like Thread and Bluetooth 5 Mesh, haven’t gained much traction. While there are a few hold-outs, most appliance manufacturers have given up on the idea of connected appliances with big touch screens on the door.

Instead, many of these grand ideas have turned into more subtle, and arguably more useful, technology. While you may not stand in front of your fridge ordering online grocery delivery on the door, it still may be connected to the internet, but to communicate with the service department when there’s a problem, or remind you to change the water filter. Many device manufacturers have spent the year improving existing IoT protocols, like Z-Wave, not replacing them with something new.

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, especially in health!

From your shoes to your hat, and every piece of clothing in between Artificial Intelligence promises to help you walk more, stand up straight, drink more water, eat healthier, and sleep well. The sensors are getting smaller, the batteries are lasting longer, and the intelligence that interprets all that data is getting smarter.

While many of these devices are standalone and require their own app, there’s a promising future of bringing them all together to give you the information you want to know, and the help you need to live a healthier lifestyle. Just like smart home devices, there are a few standards emerging that will allow these devices to communicate up to a single place.

Things that talk to each other, don’t always talk well…

While some IoT standards have fallen by the wayside, there still are too many devices out there that can’t communicate with each other because they speak different languages. As more and more manufacturers work to make their devices “smart”, they often come up with their own ways to communicate with the device. Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to connect them to other devices that could make them smarter.

That’s why you need an ecosystem like K4Connect’s FusionOS. Our platform allows all of these disparate devices to work as a single cohesive system. We don’t make our own devices, we do the hard work to connect other companies’ products into one system. This gives the user access to all the smart devices in their home, and all the advantages they can provide, through a single app, voice, or even automated scenes to make their home truly responsive.

We are constantly improving our technology and K4Community, our flagship product. The feedback from our Members is a huge part of our process.

 

By: The K4Connect Product Team

February 20, 2020

As a mission-centered company, serving our customers and members in the best way possible is always our top priority. There are a number of ways we ensure that holds true throughout our organization, including how we develop and enhance our core solution, K4Community. One of the ways we do this is with first-hand feedback through our K4Connect Product Design Program.

This process ensures that K4Community, our flagship technology solution designed for senior living communities, remains relevant, useful and essential to our core users/customers. Through a variety of avenues, we’re reaching out to our customers to demo functionality under development, test upgrades to existing features or even Beta test new features queued for release. This could be a cadence of conference calls, surveys, polls or usability tests, or even busing a group of residents to our office for lunch and discussion with our engineers. 

“At K4Connect we use cutting edge technologies and processes used by Silicon Valley companies and apply them to make sure we have the best user experience in senior living technology. The Product Design Program plays an integral role in this by ensuring feedback comes directly from our users,” said K4Connect Director of Product, Malaika Paquiot.

So, who participates in this type of program? Our participants span senior living community staff who are using K4Community daily, or will be soon, often including:

• Life Enrichment Directors
• Maintenance Personnel
• Culinary Directors
• Resident Super-Users
• Family Members

 

As one of our “super-users” Susan Drury-Rohner, Wellness Director of The Cardinal at North Hills, a Kisco Senior Living community, in Raleigh NC said of the program, “I have thoroughly enjoyed having the opportunity to provide product input over the past year-and-half. As a result, the product has truly grown into something that I feel good about promoting throughout our community and using on a regular basis. I especially value the RSVP system, the ability to print lists, track attendance by program and hopefully enjoy additional resident engagement features we’re excited about. The digital signage has also turned out to be quite user-friendly.”

The feedback we collect is instrumental to the development of K4Community, because the more you value it, the better we can make it!  

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Interested in learning more about the K4Connect Product Design Program? Reach out to us, here. 

The Youngs were instrumental in providing feedback on versions of the product and helping guide their community’s partnership decision. K4Connect VP of Business Development, Ian Sanders, catches up with The Youngs to discuss their experiences using our trial pilot program.

 

By: Ian Sanders

VP of Business Development at K4Connect

At K4Connect, we are always excited to see ever-increasing pace of technology adoption across the industry and the growing focus of executive and board leadership on establishing a long-term strategy. As a result, we have grown to more than 28,000 residents served (our Members) and 120+ communities on the platform – after launching K4Community just four years ago. However, the true focus in all that we do is not on growth, but rather on the people we serve.

Building strong relationships with our customers and members is embedded into everything that we do, from busing residents to our office for a day of product testing and Lunch & Learns with our engineers, to hands-on ongoing support and education with our Customer Success Team. And while we’ve grown significantly over the years, we are very much still at the beginning of the tremendous benefit technology has to offer the lives of older adults.

So, how far have we come? What better way to help tell that story and shed light on the “why” behind what we do, than hearing from one of our very first members.

Rewinding four years from today, fewer than 10 residents had ever used K4Community, our flagship technology solution designed for senior living. One Member of that very small group were Tom and Pat Young, residents at Magnolia Glen – a Kisco community just 10 miles away from our offices in Raleigh, NC offering independent and assisted living. Tom and and Pat volunteered to join a pilot program of five participants to trial our new product and provide feedback to the K4Connect product team.

Little did we know when we started, that this trial would begin a multi-year relationship that would go far beyond simply testing the initial product. Instead, the Youngs were instrumental in providing feedback on versions of the product, helping guide their community’s partnership decision, and even hosting our lead Series A investors from Intel at their home.

As Tom shared with our team just last week, “It was fun for us to be a part of the K4Community journey! We had the K4Connect team sitting right at our dining table making adjustments as we tried the new technology throughout our home. To now see how far the technology has come over the years — and to know we played some part in that — is very exciting.”

The Youngs have found their use of technology has changed, as time has gone by, and the value they see from features they requested in the early days of the trial have become an integral part of daily life. “We have loved the connection to our family through the app, to just pop open our tablet and video chat is such a joy. And we still have the very first tablet from when we started with K4Connect!”

As Ian Sanders, K4Connect VP of Business Development shared with us: “I can’t thank the Youngs enough for their enthusiastic feedback in the early days of our company. To be honest, not all of the feedback in the early trial was positive, but I can’t tell you how valuable it was for our team to come and hear directly from a resident using our platform every day. It made us better, and that same feedback drove a great experience for thousands of their peers around the country.”

In looking back at the last few years, we can always attribute our growth as a company to some great partners, supportive investors, and smart Advocates (our team). Ultimately, however, we can actually trace much of our success back to a few key resident Members, and the Youngs are certainly on that short list. We wouldn’t be where we are today without them. So, Thank You!

Emerging technologies aimed to help older adults find their ‘voice’ and engage can reduce the feelings of loneliness and isolation while improving quality of life.

By: Lauren J Mapp

December 25, 2019

“I love Silicon Valley, I love technology, but it’s mostly 20- and 30- and 40-year-olds building things for 20- and 30- and 40-year-olds,” said Derek Holt, K4Connect president and chief operating officer. “And then we’re surprised and, frankly, often blame seniors for not liking it.”

K4Connect is a company based in North Carolina that focuses on improving technology in senior living communities. Part of the newest wave of technology it supports, which is quickly being adopted by seniors, are voice-controlled products that work to combat feelings of loneliness, Holt said.

A 2019 technology survey from AARP found that one in seven people over 50 own a home assistant or smart speaker product like Microsoft Cortana, Apple HomePod, Google Home or one of Amazon’s suite of Echo products.

“People are really interested in finding new ways to entertain, to find answers to connect with people and to help with their everyday life,” said Barbara Smith, a San Diego Oasis instructor who teaches classes for seniors on using voice tech like Amazon Alexa.

It can reduce feelings of social isolation because people can keep in contact with friends and family without being held back by small cellphone keypads that can be difficult to use for those with dexterity issues. In senior living facilities, voice technology allows residents to find out about daily activities and what foods will be served that day.

Research from a Front Porch senior living residence in Carlsbad found that 71 percent of participants felt more connected to their community when they used voice technology, said Kari Olson, president of the Front Porch Center for Innovation and Wellbeing.

“We need different ways for people to engage in a digital world beyond a keyboard or beyond a smartphone, and voice is that,” Olson said. “The older adult population has actually been comfortable using their voice to control technology.”

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Read the full piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune, here!