

Show HN: KeepUs, a free app to help you watch out for your aging parents - tdubhro1
http://keepus.com/

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mswen
I think this looks very interesting. An interesting case where commodity
technology (mobile phones) keeps getting more and more capable and reasonable
price points and may gradually replace bespoke systems like the ones Eric
Dishman talks about in this interview.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/zinamoukheiber/2012/04/23/intels...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/zinamoukheiber/2012/04/23/intels-
eric-dishman-no-one-is-building-apps-for-seniors/)

Have you guys explored incorporating additional sensors in the data set
through bluetooth connectivity?

Or, have you considered additional capabilities that are specific to a chronic
disease?

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tdubhro1
We'd always love to have more types of data, but we haven't yet prototyped
anything that uses additional sensors. At the start we really thought that
reliable heartrate and bloodpressure sensing watches would be on the market
very soon, and we kinda designed the early versions with that in mind. As the
product developed, we were surprised how much useful status information and
trend analysis could be done with just activity and location data.

The long term trend analysis of this kind of data interests us a lot, in the
simple case of activity levels, most seniors go through a very gradual
decline, and there's no point at which anyone recognises the need for
intervention and a change in exercise habits. I think if people had the
analysis more readily, they'd see this and it could have quite a positive
outcome by prompting people to make changes in habit to recover their former
activity levels. The same analysis should work equally for chronic conditions,
and if you can merge information about medication then you should be able to
recover a very complete picture.

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mswen
I suspect that you are right about appropriate analysis of simple activity
level and location as containing significant useful information.

I looked into the telehealth market back in 2005 when I was an industry
analyst. So much more seems possible/economically feasible, now with the rise
of GPS enabled smart phones. I would still like to see a whole ecosystem of
biometric sensors develop to deliver a much richer data stream that we could
use to manage health.

