Customer Profile

WellAware Care is a Massachusetts-based company that was founded by individuals with a personal background in elder care and a professional background in technology services. Its goal is to provide assisted-living facilities, home caregivers and families with remote monitoring solutions that strike the perfect balance between safe independence for senior citizens and peace of mind for all those with a vested interest in their wellbeing.

Background

Owing to modern increases in life expectancy, Americans aged 65 and older are anticipated to make up as much as 20% of the US population by 2040, with the number of those aged 85+ doubling in the two decades prior to that. At the same time, today’s senior citizens are expressing a strong desire for independent living. A 2018 AARP survey found that 76% of Americans aged 50+ intended to stay in their current homes as they aged.

These two trends represent a growing challenge for caregivers. They want to be sure that their loved ones or clients remain healthy and safe at all times. However, they can’t be physically present around the clock, and passive, 24-7 video cameras are both invasive and ineffective. As WellAware Care points out, one in four Americans aged 65+ falls each year, and what’s more, the vast majority (75%) of these occur late at night during routine bathroom trips.

Traditional pendant alert devices—similar to the ones made famous in 1980s TV commercials—and fall-detection wristbands are often still used in these cases, but their effectiveness can be very limited. Many require user intervention, which makes little sense if that user is already incapacitated. They’re also based on a reactive model rather than a preventative one.

WellAware Care addresses these shortcomings through its suite of versatile remote monitoring solutions. By leveraging the vast and ever-expanding potential of the Internet of Things (IoT), the company has worked to develop non-intrusive, user-friendly and practical networks of connected devices, including room sensors that monitor elders’ movements and can even detect falls without relying on inconvenient wearables. These IoT devices tie into a highly automated software platform that transmits real-time alerts based on any number of customizable variables.

Why Bridgera?

In any IoT solution, seamless integration between the devices and the underlying software platform is of the utmost importance. This takes on additional urgency in care giving scenarios, where seconds can make a vital difference in severe emergencies. Responsiveness and reliability are therefore more than just perks. They’re utterly essential.

WellAware Care identified Bridgera as an ideal partner in achieving this tight level of integration. Bridgera had the necessary expertise in personal emergency response systems (PERS) to take disparate IoT devices and unify them in a single scalable, cohesive solution. Furthermore, Bridgera was willing to go the extra mile to ensure a successful outcome.

For an emerging company like WellAware Care, it was equally crucial that working with Bridgera would prove cost-effective. This is because Bridgera offers an established, extensible IoT platform that WellAware Care was able to leverage for their own remote monitoring solutions. Instead of investing considerable in-house resources to design an IoT solution from scratch, WellAware Care could achieve the level of flexibility and dependability it needed at a fraction of the cost—and far more quickly.

Results

WellAware Care engaged Bridgera at an early stage to help create what would become its Sleep Sound solution. On the strength of that close partnership and Bridgera’s IoT platform, WellAware Care was able to develop Sleep Sound in perfect alignment with its vision for the future of senior care.

Sleep Sound now enables remote caregivers to keep track of elders’ behavioral events and vital signs in real time via a secure dashboard that offers role-based access from any location. They’re provided with an itemized log of activity and immediately alerted if there seems to be a need for intervention. But this detailed remote monitoring doesn’t come at the expense of privacy. Unlike video cameras, Sleep Sound thermal cameras only capture the data needed for accurate status checks. Integration with the Withing’s sleep tracker introduces another valuable data stream from a popular off-the-shelf consumer device.

All of this works seamlessly, regardless of use case. Advanced well being analytics along with additional smart home integrations, such as automated lighting in response to late-night motion, foster safe self-sufficiency among elders who prefer to live on their own. Both seniors and caregivers enjoy peace of mind as well as a sense of freedom and independence.

And the versatile Bridgera IoT platform is powering the next generation of WellAware Care solutions like Vayyar Home. These convenient touch less, camera-less discs can be applied almost anywhere to detect falls in the vicinity. When triggered, they send a notification to a smartphone app with pinpointing information. This has the potential to not only transform the monitoring capabilities of assisted-living facilities but also save lives.

Bridgera Benefits

Remote Monitoring with Emergency Assistance

IoT-enabled remote monitoring and emergency assistance for seniors

Single Solution

Seamless integration of disparate devices into a single solution

Custom Cloud Backend

Custom-designed cloud back end for added device compatibility

User-Defined Automated Alerts

Automated alerts sent to caregivers based on user-defined rules

Simplified User-Experience

Convenient web portal to simplify on boarding, configuration and monitoring

Role-Based Access Control

Dashboard with role-based access control and clear visibility of user events

Actionable Insights

Advanced analytics for deeper insight into sleep patterns or fall probability

Highly Secure & Scable

Secure, scalable solution fully managed and operated by Bridgera