Europe: Secure home care that learns

Essence has been around for 20 years providing professional-graded security solutions. While not the first type of company that comes to mind when thinking about home care solutions, they have over 10 million products deployed and are focusing on bringing machine-to-machine functionality into the security, connected homes and home care markets.
RCR Wireless News recently spoke with Essence to better understand their approach to home care built on a security platform. This is a different way to come at this market and a very interesting one. At the simplest level it is about remotely monitoring the activities of a loved one, learning what is normal, and flagging irregularities for intervention based on these historical patterns.
There are a few things that have always stood out as flaws in many of the home care solutions.
First is the idea of pressing a panic button, which is great if you are where the panic button is. This was resolved by remote and wearable panic buttons, but what if you’re unconscious or incapacitated in a way that you cannot verbally call for help or press the panic button. Statistics show that only 20% of individuals requiring attention actually press the button at their time of need, which could result in a very long delay until help arrives.
Second is monitoring of activities such as opening the refrigerator, using the stove, opening a pill bottle, etc. This is all great too, but unless you are also watching via a video camera you don’t know if a pill was actually taken, anything was cooked, food/drinks were removed from the refrigerator and so on. There is also the question of frequency. Are these routines normal in their patterns of occurrence or is it just a yes/no measure of them occurring?
Last are the actual health measurements. Although it’s great to envision your medical professional being able to remotely monitor things such as your heart rate, blood pressure and glucose. The fact remains that the user has to connect to a remote peripheral somehow in order to do so. It’s likely not always feasible to envision all home care individuals are able to do this.
Essence doesn’t address this last item, but they have a different way of looking at the first two. By taking what they’ve learned in the professional-graded security business and applying it to their Care@home solution, they are able to monitor and “learn” what activities occur during a normal day for home care individuals.

This learning model is a key functionality derived from the security legacy of Essence. The solution uses a combination of motion sensors, smoke and flood detectors, door/window sensors, video cameras and an emergency call device to monitor the situation. Over the first four weeks after installation the system learns the daily routine of the person and creates flags for notification – to family members and/or the service provider – to alert that something is abnormal. Currently, there are three thresholds identified for action and the service provider also has the capability to set these thresholds from their end. Some examples of the activities monitored are factors such as frequency and time spent in the bathroom, movement, door opens/closes and appliance usage.
It will be very interesting to watch this model unfold in the future to see how health care service providers and mobile operators might enter this arena to enable a comprehensive end-to-end offer. Essence’s first live customer with this offer was announced earlier this year with Natali Healthcare Solutions, http://www.essence-grp.com/news-and-events/news/32.