GE buys elder care remote monitoring start-up

By: Brian Dolan | Dec 2, 2009

GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric, has acquired remote monitoring company Living Independently Group for an undisclosed sum. LIG’s key product is still in development: QuietCare is an infrared sensor system that monitors seniors activity throughout the day and sends alerts to caregivers if seniors appear to need assistance. GE Healthcare acquired a minority stake in the New York-based start-up in September 2008.

LIG planned to offer QuietCare worldwide and targeted senior housing, home care, hospitals, health systems, other aging services professionals and individuals aging-in-place as its potential customer base.

The acquisition follows hot on the heels of GE Healthcare’s agreement with Intel earlier this year. As part of that deal, GE began marketing Intel’s Health Guide. At the time of the agreement, QuietCare was highlighted as a key offering that GE brought to the table. Intel and GE plan to invest $250 million over the next five years for research and development into this emerging market of wireless sensors. Intel and GE predict that the home-health monitoring market will grow to $7.7 billion by 2012, which means it would more than double from today’s $3 billion home-health monitoring market.

Modern Healthcare has a thorough description of how LIG’s QuietCare system works:

“Motion sensors throughout an apartment or home use infrared technology to track a resident’s movements and feed the information to a base station in the apartment or home. Software in the base station “learns” a resident’s daily activities, such as the number of nightly bathroom visits, the times meals are made and when prescriptions are taken. The base unit transmits data to Living Independently Group via telephone lines. The vendor analyzes the data for deviations from normal activity for a resident. … The vendor alerts caregivers to possible problems via pager, telephone, e-mail or a secure Web site. The sensors also monitor temperature and send alerts if an apartment is dangerously hot or cold.”

For more, read this article from Modern Healthcare

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http://www.wirelesslifesciences.org/2009/12/ge-buys-elder-care-remote-monitoring-start-up/ GE buys elder care remote monitoring start-up | Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance

[...] Read more from the original source: GE buys elder care remote monitoring start-up [...]
http://www.telecareaware.com Donna Cusano

Unfortunately, several comments/corrections are in order:
QuietCare is not suitable for use in hospitals or nursing homes in its present configuration. However GE may have (again) targeted discharge planners for transfer of patients to assisted living or home.
The majority of QuietCare units are in assisted living facilities.
The $250 million investment mentioned was between GE Healthcare and Intel for joint marketing of Intel Home Health, not involving LIG or QuietCare.
I’m currently Editor, North America for Telecare Aware (www.telecareaware.com), but I also was Vice President, Marketing for LIG up to April of this year, and was part of the first stage integration with GEHC.
http://mobihealthnews.com Brian Dolan

Thanks, Donna. The use cases were pulled directly from the QuietCare website — clearly you have an inside view of the product’s readiness, so I am happy to defer — but those are the customer groups they have stated as targets.

I understand the $250M agreement has only officially included Intel Health Guides to date, but as noted in the linked to backgrounder articles — the speculation is that GE’s stake in QuietCare might play a role in the venture moving forward.

Thanks for your note,
Brian
http://www.ageinplacetech.com/ Laurie Orlov

I don’t think this has much significance in the near term and I suspect little money was spent on this compared to the sizable sum that over the years was spent to market LIG’s offering, first to consumers then to senior housing organizations after that failed. And while QuietCare is certainly used in some independent living facilities, there are a number of issues associated with it and in general with the category, which in my view is a very early market, requiring much improvement that perhaps GE will eventually fund:

a) First of all, unless there is pattern analysis reporting about behavioral change over time, which to my knowledge QuietCare doesn’t have, the product is little more than an alert mechanism on motion or absence of motion in a room. That puts it into the same questionable category as traditional PERS devices like Lifeline, for example. False positives for various reasons (vacation? a cat? what about roommates?). It provides someone a false sense of reassurance, when a frail elderly person still can slide out of a wheelchair or the bed onto the floor in the middle of the night and QuietCare (or Lifeline) are both useless.

b) It’s great that it can alert for environmental factors like smoke, but an alarm system is more useful — and can even handle break-ins, the most fundamental of technologies for seniors.

c) QuietCare is not integrated with any communications technology — perhaps even a television with the near-defunct WebTV — would be better than nothing for a senior to communicate with family members as well as be monitored for absence of motion.

d) Far more interesting would be a combination of wearable fall detection with environmental sensing — monitoring a person (fall detection like Halo Monitoring and body temperature affected by fear or fever) and monitoring the environment, like HealthSense, QuietCare, or GrandCare.

e) Even more interesting will be the eventual usefulness of tracking capabilities that follow an individual more than 500 feet — like PERS devices — away from the house — like cell phones.
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[...] this week we reported that GE Healthcare had acquired remote monitoring company Living Independently Group for an undisclosed sum. LIG’s key product is still in development: QuietCare, an infrared sensor [...]
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[...] assets moving to the new JV include Intel Health Guide, Intel Reader and GE Healthcare’s QuietCare. The new company plans to develop and market new products, services and technologies, [...]
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[...] which converts text to speech, and GE QuietCare, a motion-sensing system that GE acquired when it purchased Living Independently Group in late [...]
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[...] which converts text to speech, and GE QuietCare, a motion-sensing system that GE acquired when it purchased Living Independently Group in late 2009. It also will continue extensive market research efforts in hopes of convincing [...]

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