Personalization by Users, for Users—Not Hosts
Introductory Series • Post 7
This is the third of four posts explaining why our proposed innovations—Proactive Voice-AI Agents (PVAIs) and User-Controlled Services (UCS)—will have a profound, positive impact on the nascent market for e-care—benefiting hundreds of millions worldwide and finally enabling us to use AI + the internet for the greatest good. Here, we examine how PVAIs with humans-at-the-helm enable personalization tailored to care recipients’ needs rather than service providers’ financial goals.
Caring for a close relative or friend is about as personal as life gets. A loving family caregiver naturally adapts their caregiving to reflect what they know about their relative-in-need—both their medical history and recent events.
Their lifelong relationship usually means they know one another’s favorite songs, preferred blogs or books, as well as the biggest challenges they’ve each faced over time.
Consider Sarah, a working mother herself who knows her 80-year-old mom gets anxious every day around 5 pm—the time her late husband used to come home from work. Sarah could personalize a PVAI to check in then with a comforting reminder for her mom to call her daughter or listen to her favorite music.
No professional caregiver working hourly shifts could know this … and no AI algorithm could infer it from EHR data. Professional caregivers simply don’t have the time or the resources to understand a client’s status or wellbeing—what techies call “current-state data”—or to use that understanding to personalize care in this way.
As important, physicians and other clinical professionals address only a fraction of what drives our holistic health. It’s widely accepted, for example, that only 10-15% of our wellbeing is determined by the medical care we receive, while 35-40% stems from our ability—or inability—to practice healthy behaviors. Family caregivers are typically very familiar with these behaviors, while professional caregivers know little, if anything, about them.
Studies suggest that other leading contributors to our whole health include the socio-economic environment within which we live (30-35%) and our genetic or biological makeup (20-25%).[i]
Recently, more professionals have acknowledged the importance of considering their clients’ holistic health in determining the care they provide. Indeed, the impact of these so-called “social determinants of health” (SDOH)—our behaviors, relationships, and environments—on our sense of wellbeing is now widely accepted.
However, physicians are trained to diagnose and treat only that 10-15% of our whole health driven by medical conditions, while specialists focus on specific behaviors or conditions within the larger picture. Compounding their restricted focus, healthcare professionals generally limit their care to scheduled appointments and hourly visits, and rarely if ever interact with clients between sessions.
In stark contrast, close relatives or friends often worry around-the-clock about someone for whom they’re caring. At the same time, they instinctively consider the factors that shape their loved one’s sense of wellbeing—the SDOH—when they develop and follow a personalized care plan.
As a result, their care plans are ideally suited both for in-person care and for configuring a PVAI to monitor and support their loved one when they can’t be there themselves.
The opportunity, therefore, is not to expand paid professional care to address SDOH for all clients, but instead to provide personal caregivers with the digital tools—PVAIs and UCS—to monitor and support their loved ones’ holistic needs when they can’t care for them, in person, themselves.
Whose interests does digital “personalization” really serve?
Another major difference between institution-driven and user-driven personalization of online services lies in the motivations behind them.
Professional caregivers are motivated by their calling—caring for individuals, usually by the hour, in return for compensation. Consumer app providers, meanwhile, promote their ability to tailor apps to individual users, but their primary motivation is to get more users to use their app more often and purchase more of whatever they produce and provide.
Institutional healthcare providers are also motivated to “maximize client engagement” via digital channels, though their main aim is to improve care quality and outcomes rather than to monetize eyeballs and maximize profits.
Given these institutional motivations—commercial or clinical—it’s clear that today’s “personalization” of mobile apps and online services is designed to serve providers’ goals more than users’ needs.
Consider Netflix. An “e-commerce personalization platform” called Rebuy Engine claims that Netflix’s “ability to personalize product recommendations is second to none,” citing as proof that Netflix earns over $1 billion in “customer retention revenue annually.”[ii]
In other words, Netflix “personalizes” their service to keep us watching and paying for videos—earning a billion dollars more per year by doing so. From an AI perspective, their algorithms “know” us well enough to recommend content we’re apt to enjoy.
Ask yourself: Who benefits most when Netflix earns $1 billion annually from their industry-leading personalization while users get AI-driven recommendations about what to watch next?
Commercial “personalization” may work well for providers of streaming entertainment, but it’s a far cry from the personalization needed for holistic caregiving—where true personalization requires relationships and empathy built over time, not algorithms optimized for profit.
Real personalized care requires personal relationships
Family and friend caregivers are not motivated to generate increased engagement or more revenue—they’re motivated by the personal, often loving, relationship they have with their care recipient. As such, they can easily determine—if they don’t already know—what their loved one wants and needs.
It strikes us as common sense, therefore, that family and friend caregivers—or the third parties they hire—should have full control over any AI-driven apps that are designed to monitor and care for someone in need.
PVAIs can serve as the digital platform that enables family caregivers-at-the-helm to personalize ambient, voice-first apps to monitor and support their loved ones’ holistic wellbeing.
Through the same PVAIs, family caregivers will also be able to coordinate the specialized monitoring and care that only medical and behavioral professionals can provide—bringing together everyday support and specialized care in service of their loved ones’ holistic wellbeing.
In our next post, we’ll explore how this fundamental shift—from institution-controlled to user-controlled personalization—will restore our trust in digital technology and create the foundation for a caregiving revolution.
[i] GoInvo, Determinants of Health visualization, July 2017, https://www.goinvo.com/vision/determinants-of-health/
[ii] Rebuy Engine post, “How Netflix Uses Personalization to Drive Billions in Revenue”, February 2024, https://www.rebuyengine.com/blog/netflix