Reimagining Medical Alerts Using People-Centered AI Innovation

Join LogicMark CEO, Chia-Lin Simmons, and GOVTECH CONNECT CEO, Susan Sharer, on today's episode of the Fed to Fed Podcast. 

We explore how human-centric innovation, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are transforming medical alert systems and veteran care within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

When your mission is to care for people, an organization needs to move past "push-button" medical alerts using the latest in emerging sensor technology and data analysis, combined with empathetic design, to improve safety, independence, and response rates for personal emergency response systems (PERS). 

We'll explore the challenges in developing this technology and examine how, by applying lessons learned, the VA and its partners have improved safety and independence for veterans while preserving the critical role of human responders during emergencies. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Fed to Fed podcast, where we dive into the dynamic world of government technology. In this podcast series, we'll be joined by current and former federal leaders and industry trailblazers at the forefront of innovation. Here, we speak openly and honestly about the challenges and opportunities facing the federal government and the Department of Defense and its partners in the modern age, driving innovation and the incredible capabilities of technology along the way. Whether you're a federal leader, a tech industry professional, or simply fascinated by IT modernization, just like us, this podcast is for you. And we're so happy to have you tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for the invitation, Susan. I'm glad to be here. I am so looking forward to this discussion and diving into the great work your company has done for many, many years on behalf of delivering great service to the VA. Could you tell us a little bit more about that journey and talk about these last four years where you joined the company and you're driving things at such an important time during this time in technology? Absolutely. So magic. Mark is no stranger to the VA business. We have been in business since since 2006, and I believe almost since its inception, that the company we have been working in partnership with the VA, offering medical darts or purs units to the VA since that time. We are proud to be a partner, obviously. And so we do have sort of a history of relationship with the VA that I think has been a very good one. We pride ourselves on having amazing customer service. We have dedicated phone lines for the VA. We actually will stay for hours, with a veteran to make sure that they're protected, because we really hold our mission to be sacred, which is to actually help people, you know, live their best lives and to actually feel that independence and that the device actually gives them and to provide them with safety and security. So I joined the company about four years ago, and the company was in a transition period. And so the previous, two CEOs had some issues with the company. And so I was brought on the by the board to make a lot of significant changes to the company. Not necessarily in terms of the service that we are providing or even the technology, but to really help the company take the next step forward as way of a background. My, I spent the majority of my career in some pretty leading edge technology companies, probably companies that folks have heard of. I was at Amazon or Audible, by way of, Amazon to help sell the company to Amazon was at Google as an executive. And so I spent a good chunk of my career, actually, in this intersection between hardware and software services. And so I was really looking at re-envisioning the company to do a more around person and medical. Let's and why? Mainly because as a child, I grew up doing medical tech companies on TV, and it was the I fell and and I can't get up business and so and very little has changed in that business. And generally it's because the companies that work in this category space, they are not necessarily technology companies or technology innovators, but they came from a different sort of approach to the technology. And so they were generally companies that happened perhaps, perhaps in the sort of home securities business. And so they were already protecting your home. And so they kind of grabbed on to a device and said, if you push this button, you know, for your parents, we can watch over them too. And so they had a business model that was really premised around, we have a monitor service with people who are sitting in these rooms, and they will pick up and help when they can, and that was their model. And so even at the inception of this particular company, the founder of this company was trying to break that paradigm because the cost to do that was very high. You had to do recurring billing. And at a time when most Americans didn't have things that were recurring billing outside of cable TV, right? Going back to the MTV days, which just shut down. Right. So those are the olden days. And so it was really costly. And so when this company was founded was to sort of break that paradigm and say, you know, look, you can live another 30 years and paying monthly seems a little scary. And so why not give you a direct connection to 911? And so really, I was brought on board to continue, I think the spirit of innovation, that logic Mark has always held and really helped pivot it to the IoT connected, AI enabled, world that we live in today and to re infuse the company with innovation again and so to do so, you know, we were really trying to bring some of the background of work I've done around AI, around IoT, to really think about and transform how we look at medical alerts. And so, you know, that means it's not just a dumb device that you push the button and it takes you to a room full of people and they kind of pick up and, and then take you to 911. We really wanted to see, hey, what can we do and what can we use IoT and AI to help understand and maybe even prevent that first wall to be less about just not just to be a really good reactive technology company. We have to be better than anybody else in understanding what's a far what's on offer, because nothing pisses people off more than if they're not falling and your device goes off and that happens a lot, right? Because the technology hasn't innovated for years and continues to be somewhat sort of singular. But how do we become better at that reaction? And knowing what's a fan, what's outfall and really tell it to you personally and know what's probably more of a fall, not of offering you, but also be able to say, hey, you know, what are we seeing in terms of trending, how you're reacting and how you're moving and your activities and all of those things that might give us an indicator that you may be at risk for a fall, because the best outcome for that vet and the best outcome for the VA, we think, is that we can help prevent that fall or a second fall, because the health outcome is so much worse. And that means for the that worse health and they don't live longer for the VA, a population that is less healthy and it cost them more whenever there's more falls. And so we think that that's really directionally where the industry should be going, and that's how we should be applying AI and IoT technology. That's awesome. So tell me more about that. You know, you all are pushing the envelope. Tell me more about how you reach into their technology to be able to meet those needs. And I wouldn't say that we're pushing technology. I mean, certainly IoT technology and connectivity has been around for a while. It's just, again, when you look at our competitors, it's just not directionally where most of these companies start. They're just not there monitoring companies at their heart rate. So they care about trying to optimize, lower their costs of people that have to be in the call center or all of those things. And we don't come from that approach. We come from approach of technology, innovation, putting people first. So when I talk about human centric innovation or empathetic innovation, that means that we're not really looking at how we're just trying to lower costs for ourselves. But really what we're trying to look at is when we apply, for example, why do we want to apply AI? Because people don't want to wear things if it's triggering too often and it's not smart, right? So that's what we want. Why do we want to put AI in place? We want to have a situation where AI is helping us look at such a vast amount of data on a longitudinal basis, because we're tracking like, hey, you're a 10,000 step walker up now. You're like slowly, slowly, slowly within the last nine months or ten months, like doing less steps, like what's going on. Like when we see this pattern and other people have this pattern, like, do we see that they had a fallen up? And so if we see this pattern should be concern and should we share that with your professional caretakers, you know, did you invite us to sort of share that with the VA or with your children or some of those things? Right. And so we want to be able to help prevent that, because that could be an indication that you are, you know, perhaps having, you know, problems with your leg so you're less willing to walk. You feel a little shaky like, so how do we help you be more active but be safe, right. So all of those things are indicators that we can help. We just put in medicine reminder for one of our services and activity tracker. Why do we want to know those things? But not because we're nosy? Nellies right? It's because we know that net adherence and the lack of that adherence has a lot of, you know, indicators for potential falls and again, less activity if you're walking last year, you know, typically waking up at eight and going to sleep at ten, but now you're waking up at ten and going to sleep at seven. Like all of those, give us an indication that you may not be at your best, right? Or your health is deteriorating. That's a lot of data that we're trying to process. And really great place to utilize AI to help us look for patterns. But we're not we're not like looking at the details of like, oh, like Mr. Smith is, you know, doing this well, trying to say like there's a pattern, like, I don't I'm not trying to figure out, you know, all the scary things that you don't want me to know. The more that we see a pattern shift in this. And so when we see a pattern shift, does this match other pattern shifts in the aggregate level? And so how do we help Mr. Smith try to avoid that fall. And so for us that's a really great place to apply AI. And that's a human centric, putting Mr. Smith in the center of applying technology versus what we're seeing today and what we're seeing people like, hey, look, we have a technology like an AI agent. And so when you have a fall, this agent will pick up right away. And I'm like, okay, well, so, you know, my interest is the reason why you'd want to do that is because you want to have less people agents. But the reality is, is that when you're at your most vulnerable and you're at your worst, like you really want an empathetic human being on the other side. And so I actually want to put all of the crazy stuff that's like data driven and like maybe just like a lot of book stuff that want less people processing that and more people interfacing with people, because the last thing I want to do is have an AI agent say, and I'm like, help, help. And I'm like, breathing is not good and not good. My voice is weak, but the AI will just hear help. And that's what you're taking as a data set versus a human could say, oh my goodness, her voice is weak and like her breathing is really hard. So I actually have to, you know, work on this really fast. And like, there's not one bigger problem because as people were processing things differently than a machine, and you can try to train your machine and try to train a machine to do more and more. But that element of human processing and empathy and dealing with people at their very bad situation, we want a human to actually interface with a human right. If we're all frustrated with actually having problems with our technology and we want to talk to an agent, but all we get is like another computer, think about that level of frustration. But when you're down, right. So when we talk about this, when we see other people applying, I am always like, why are you applying an AI agent to interface with people? You want people to help people and you want to use AI in the best possible way, which is helping to look at the large bodies of data to help us look for trends and patterns and all of those things. Right. So this is what we think the future needs to be. And that's what we're really applying. I love it. What success have you seen in the short term. I mean certainly that we are, you know, rolling out the first of these devices out into the, the VA and into the market. And so we are very excited, I mean, certainly that we, you know, are putting the sort of structure in place to sort of make that happen. So our models have been working great. We have two patents around running like multiple sensors on, the fall detection products, because again, most devices today run an accelerometer. That's their patent. So even the iWatch right. One sensor is how quickly you go and then how quickly you stop. Right. That's why like I watches go off all the time. When you're skiing Tahoe. So everybody's watch goes off. The entire 911 system goes haywire. You know, there was an article, I think it was titled, like my I watch things, I'm dead. And sort of like, sort of cataloged this sort of situation. And so the, our patents are tied around multiple sensors because I'm a geek, I believe that, like, you need more than one sensor to sort of really understand, you know, if there's a far and certainly the clinicians could back us up on this. Right. Because not everybody is falling at a fast pitch. They're not walking so fast that that sort of acceleration and stop is still abrupt. Right. There's people who slap. My mother in law slumped since fall detection device would not ever catch it. And she was on the floor. She wasn't wearing her device even because, you know, it goes off too often. And so she was eating. So she puts it there and then she fell. So we're looking for ways to also enhance our technology even. And we're going to be very excited to talk about our new technology that we're going to be announcing it in two weeks, that we're going to be looking for other ways to do this, because we know that this is not the only method to do it. Wearables. I mean, think about this. Like today, our solution for people in the shower is that there's something you mount on the wall. And typically in a retirement community for example, it's mounted on a wall and 50% of falls probably are more happened in a shower. So if you fall, then you have dragged yourself over to that wall and pull that cord, right. And you certainly don't want like, you know, one of those like home security cameras in there. Right. And so we have a solution in place for that. And, you know, we have a solution. So if you fell but you were nonverbal because you had a stroke and can't talk, we can help you. And so we're looking for innovation. And we think that it's an area that needs to happen, like 25% of our population in the U.S alone will be 65 and over, right. And 1 in 4 people over 65 will have a fall. This is not just a large VA problem, it's a large U.S. population problem. Well, I cannot wait to see the new technology and how you all plan to launch that. And I'm so looking forward to talking to you more about all the amazing work that you're doing to come not only with the VA, but the greater community as well. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for the opportunity. This concludes today's episode of the Fed to Fed podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review. Your feedback helps us continue bringing you thought provoking sessions with the brightest minds in government, technology. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to explore opportunities to harness the power of technology and explore what's next in developing a more innovative and efficient government. Until then, this is the Fed to Fed podcast by GovTech Connects. Thank you for joining us.