A Global Crisis in Search of an Online Solution

Our mission and what's ahead ...

The global demand for mobile apps and online services to connect and support both caregivers and their care recipients has been growing for decades.

Nonetheless, healthcare tech startups have yet to provide much other than (a) tele-health solutions for virtual visits and (b) point solutions for self-care of specific diseases or conditions – neither of which addresses the myriad needs of tens of millions of family caregivers and their loved ones who are aging-in-place.

Instead, the global crisis in caring for people as they suffer from disabling chronic conditions (e.g., dementia), debilitating falls and the social determinants of health (e.g., isolation and loneliness) continues to grow.

This crisis is particularly acute in the United States where it is substantially more expensive yet arguably less efficacious – as measured in human outcomes – to care for someone and to receive professional care than elsewhere.

Most readers will have experienced this crisis firsthand before they turn 50 as caregivers or care recipients or both.

By then, most of us have confronted the challenges of monitoring and supporting an aging relative or friend from a distance and, in the process, learned that we have few, if any, affordable options other than to add “personal caregiver” to our other roles as parents, partners, friends and employees.

Relying instead on paid, professional caregivers is expensive and made even more problematic by the shrinking supply of qualified caregivers … which causes costs to rise in a never-ending spiral.

Even those lucky enough to have a paid or volunteer “workforce” to help them care for a loved one are often consumed by the time and effort required to manage their “caregiving team”!

Everyone’s talking about it … everywhere

If you’ve yet to serve as personal caregiver or care recipient, you’ve likely read or heard about it in the constant drumbeat of anecdotes and analyses coming through on all types of media.

In his widely acclaimed book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, for example, Dr. Atul Gawande describes the intractable challenges facing Americans as they age and their caregivers.

Gawande concludes that biomedical innovations have enabled us to lengthen life but have yet to provide digital solutions that enable care recipients to maintain their independence and quality-of-life as they age or to help caregivers monitor and support them … or both.

Along the way, he acknowledges the obvious – that any such solution that works will launch a massive, new market:

If scientists came up with a device—call it an “automatic defrailer”—that wouldn’t extend your life but would slash the likelihood you’d end up in a nursing home or miserable with depression, we’d be clamoring for it. … Medical students would be jockeying to become defrailulation specialists, and Wall Street would be bidding up company stock prices.

While his imagined automatic defrailer may never come to pass, it’s well past time for AI + the internet to ease the burdens of aging for all – both care recipients and their family caregivers.

The point of departure …

This all begs an important question: Why hasn’t the past 30 years of investment and innovation in the digital-virtual space resulted in an array of mobile apps and online solutions that help caregivers monitor and support their aging relatives or clients at home while simultaneously serving those for whom they care?

It’s not for lack of technology or vision. Large language models now support conversational chatbots tailored to specific users and tasks.

New voice chatbots are providing mental health counseling that is less expensive yet, for some, more convenient and effective than in-person therapy (e.g., BetterHelp). A few of these chatbots are even being added to robots that seem to see and move slowly!

Despite these and other advances, however, leading voice-AI agents (e.g., Alexa and Siri) have not evolved to help individual caregivers monitor and care for someone else—on the caregiver’s behalf—via a friendly yet automated voice.

What to expect …

In this Substack, John and I will explain and explore why the virtual world has yet to find its “voice” … and how it can and will find it soon!

We’ll identify the foundational barriers in the current AI+internet model that have delayed the development of an “e-care” market for connected, voice-AI agents that work for and with human caregivers and their care recipients.

Then, we’ll outline our vision of what’s possible now. We’ll describe how two tech innovations will enable entrepreneurs and care providers to overcome these barriers and launch groundbreaking apps and business models that will benefit millions, eventually billions, of caregivers and care recipients alike.

We hope you’ll read on!

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