Telecare industry is shifting

The telecare industry has traditionally used dispersed alarms – a small, portable alarm that might be worn around somebody’s neck as a pendant – which is pressed in case of an emergency, which then sends out an alert to a call station, who in turn alerts the emergency services.

 But this industry is changing, against a backdrop of an ageing population, a shortage in carers and long hospital waits; a survey conducted in June 2024 by Essence SmartCare, working in partnership with Kantar on the state of advanced senior monitoring technology in the UK, referenced the figure that 1.6 million elderly people have experienced at least one fall and for 10% of those over 70, this results in a hospital visit.

Falls that are referred to as ‘unaddressed’ cost the NHS £435 million per year. Beyond the cost, there is an emotive element to the picture of an elderly person experiencing a fall, hurting themselves, and being left on the floor for several hours because they live alone. The telecare industry has evolved, from offering dispersed alarms to AI-based and IoT-enabled monitoring technologies that open up the possibility of a preventive or proactive healthcare approach.

This is the sector in which Essence SmartCare operates. Essence SmartCare was established by its parent company Essence Group 10 years ago. Today, it has devices deployed in almost one million homes around the world; dozens of thousands of which are within the UK, Essence SmartCare’s VP Revenue Yossi Graff told me.

“We felt this need for better solutions for the elderly, for those who are living in their homes and aren’t protected enough,” he explained. “The only kind of protection they receive is potentially a button in a box from their local council.” This image of the ‘button in a box’ inspired the company to develop solutions that are more sophisticated and discreet, and have less stigma around them, according to Graff. “We believed that elderly people shouldn’t have to wear stigmatised products, like the pendants they still receive today. Because this is happening within their own home.”

IoT-enabled devices

The first device launched in the early 2010s was not a dispersed alarm, but instead an AI-based solution capable of monitoring daily living activities based on the dispersed alarm. “The dispersed alarm was like a gateway, on which we built a new concept of monitoring daily living using artificial intelligence,” said Graff.

This device works by using sensors to monitor and analyse daily activities such as sleeping in until 10am, or showering for 20 minutes, to establish what normal patterns of behaviour are. If the person deviates from their normal patterns of behaviour – which require two or three deviations, Graff explained, and not just one such as waking up later than usual – then an alarm is sounded off to the caregiver, or a family member.

The company’s devices use cellular connectivity including 2G, 3G, 4G and “very soon 5G,” according to Graff. There is also the option to connect it by an Ethernet cable and via Wi-Fi. The gateway the company built was designed to be intelligent and future-ready, so that different devices within someone’s home can connect easily. “They can be very easily added in the home environment, and when I mean very easily, the pairing process to the gateway involves putting the batteries inside a device, and then it is connected to the gateway,” explained Graff.

The addition of voice activation in 2016 means if somebody wants to sound the alarm, they don’t have to press a button, and can call the emergency services by using their own device. “The voice activation is processed on the Edge,” said Graff, “Which means it’s not in the Cloud where you might have connectivity, resilience, or privacy issues.” In addition, elderly people who may have fallen can make calls from the area they’re in, rather than the gateway’s location in another room.

In 2020 Essence SmartCare launched a radar-based full detector, which can be installed on the wall, in a corner of the room, harking back to the point Graff is keen to stress about offering elderly individuals the access to discrete care. “It has a radar sensor which uses AI and on the Edge capabilities to identify when a person is lying on the floor. Our deep learning model has been trained on 20,000 body positions that enables it to recognise falls with precision,” he said.

Bringing benefits

On the point of potentially unforeseen benefits brought about using this technology – as a conversation I recently had with researchers similarly using AI to monitor behaviours said the “peace of mind” it offered was something they hadn’t anticipated - Graff said: “We have many cases of service providers who tell us how it helped them, their caregivers and family members to feel calmer. “This is a big problem for the NHS. We are missing approximately 150,000 caregivers. Giving one caregiver, who is responsible for 20 people, a tablet to plan their day according to their patients’ daily routines and with the information we send from our system can save them a lot of time and enable them to target the people who are in need of care.”

Three major shifts are impacting the telecare industry right now: the shift from analogue to digital, which Graff noted didn’t affect Essence as they have always offered digital devices; from reactive to proactive care; and integrated care services (ICS) which is beginning to combine the responsibilities of councils, in safety, and the NHS, in health, to offer a full umbrella of solutions.

“We don’t want the seniors to work for the technology, we want the technology to work for the seniors,” Graff concluded in a pretty apt statement summing up their mission and impact on the telecare industry.

This article originally appeared in the August'24 magazine issue of Electronic Specifier Design – see ES's Magazine Archives for more featured publications.