AI App MyndYou Partners with Aging Care Group to Track Elderly

Senior citizens are at great risk of physical and mental decline, according to a story about a tech company by Paul Sawyers on Venturebeat.com.

As pandemic-driven social distancing and self-isolation measures permeate society, safeguarding vulnerable people is more important than ever. The vast majority of elderly people would rather “age in place” in their own homes than move in with family or a retirement facility. This trend had already led to a surge in technologies to monitor seniors and communicate with them remotely, but the COVID-19 crisis has made it even more critical.

Along with fall-detection contraptions and targeted social networks, AI-powered social companions and wearable devices are helping to track activity and behavioral changes in seniors.

Ruth Poliakine Baruchi, founder and CEO of MyndYou, an Israeli Israeli start-up focusing on elderly care and tracking physical and mental decline. (Source: MyndYou)

Fledgling Israeli startup MyndYou is using AI to help care providers access and monitor elderly patients from afar, with a platform centered on passive data collection, automated engagement and remote intervention. The company raised $4 million in a series A round of funding and unveiled a new partnership with the Aging Life Care Association (ALCA), a U.S. membership-based organization for care professionals.

Elderly individuals with smartphones can download the MyndYou For You app, which uses sensors from the phone to passively monitor and analyze patterns in daily activities. These include speech (when the user is on a call), walking and driving.

“Changes over time could indicate deteriorating physical or cognitive faculties, and these insights are sent directly to the individual’s care managers, who can then engage their client with targeted interventions,” according to the story.

In the future, MyndYou plans to offer the ability to track clients’ sleep patterns using hardware that connects to the user’s phone. The company chose to omit sleep-tracking contraptions for now to streamline the user experience.

“Sleep is an important parameter, but we chose to postpone it as we wanted the initial solution to be as seamless and simple as possible and not to require any additional hardware devices [that] may concern seniors,” MyndYou cofounder and CEO Ruth Poliakine Baruchi told VentureBeat.

The company expects its AI to help anticipate the seniors’ needs as they evolve. MyndYou partnered with AllScripts in January to help monitor high-risk patients and provide “triage” if monitoring shows they are suffering a decline or struggling with self-care.

read more at venturebeat.com