San Diego-based GreatCall — an old guard digital health company which started out making smartphones for seniors in 2006 but now offers a suite of connected safety products and services for aging in place individuals — has been acquired by retail chain Best Buy for $800 million.
GreatCall was previously acquired in June 2017 by private equity firm GTCR for an undisclosed amount. GTCR is selling...
Trumbull, Connecticut-based FallCall Solutions has raised a sub-$1 million seed round from Connecticut Ventures to develop a pure software-based Personal Emergency Response System (PERS) for the Apple Watch. While automated fall detecction is in the company's future pipeline, the initial launch of the app, on Apple Watch and iPhone, works as an app-based help button that can be activated by voice...
Dutch investment company Main Capital Partners has acquired a majority stake in Verklizan, a Dutch telehealth infrastructure company. Currently Verklizan operates in the Netherlands, Germany, England, France, and Spain, but one of the goals of the acquisition is to support continued international expansion.
Verklizan offers a "innovative, cloud-based, Connected Healthcare platform for social...
GreatCall, the San Diego company that started out making smartphones for seniors in 2006 but now offers a suite of connected safety products for aging in place individuals, has been acquired by Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR. The amount of the deal was not disclosed.
"The business services team has been focused on this PERS world for the better part of a decade, looking for the option...
At its World Wide Developers Conference this week, Apple introduced several updates to the health and fitness features on the Apple Watch that will come with the launch of the new WatchOS: a new emergency alert feature called SOS, some updates to the device's Activity app, and a new meditation app called Breathe.
Breathe is an app that walks users through short deep-breathing exercises. Users can...
Nearly a year after stepping down as CEO of Practice Fusion, Ryan Howard has announced his new venture, started with a team of other former Practice Fusion colleagues. The company is called iBeat, and its first product will be a wearable personal emergency response system (PERS) device aimed at the 50 to 70-year-old market.
“It’s a clean-looking smartwatch. It’s really clean, really stylish, we’...
The number of people in Europe and North America that will use mobile telcare systems, also known as personal emergency response systems (PERS), will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent from 450,000 in 2015 to almost 3.4 million by 2021, according to a report from Berg Insight.
Berg defines a mobile telecare system as one that uses a portable device with cellular connectivity and...
Nortek Security and Control (NSC), which bought mPERS and telehealth company Numera Libris this past summer, has announced the first new product from the Numera brand post-acquisition. Numera EverThere, a cloud-based data analytics and notification platforms for seniors aging in place.
"We’re bringing together personal safety and emergency response with health monitoring and providing services...
The global mobile health market is expected to top $49 billion by 2020, according to research firm Grand View Research, which made the same prediction 18 months ago. In 2012 the firm valued the global mobile health market at $1.95 billion. Grand View predicts the market will have a compound annual growth rate of nearly 48 percent from 2013 to 2010.
The increasingly large aging population and the...
Seattle, Washington-based Numera, a longtime mobile health company that offers mobile personal emergency response devices as well as other telehealth tools, has had its mPERS and telehealth assets acquired by Carlsbad, California-based Nortek Security and Control. According to a Nortek FAQ, Nortek funded the transaction, valued at $12 million "plus contingent consideration based on future sales...
