In September 2016, the Canadian Centre for Aging & Brain Health Innovation (CC-ABHI) called on point-of-care workers to think outside the box and bring their BIG IDEAS forward when it came to improving health care solutions for older adults.
We've scoured the globe to find very best aging-focused startups and we're bringing the finalists to you at the Aging2.0 OPTIMIZE conference! Throughout the last few weeks, the winners of local Global Startup Search events have been evaluated by online voters & expert judges.
See a product swamped by global media hype miss expectations. Refunds for international backers of Jibo. In December, 2015, cute ‘social’ robot Jibo “received $16 million from Asian VCs to enable it to speak and sell in Japan and China.” And that was just a portion of the total of $52 million raised, the first chunk on IndieGogo found 5,554 supporters raising $2.3 million. But what just happened should not be a surprise. Why? Because “it won’t function up to our standards in your country… and will create more issues with Jibo’s ability to understand accented English than we view as acceptable.” Why all this money for a poorly defined, loosely described $500 table-top and presumably robotic companion beloved in the media? Why indeed, as the GeekWire article rightly observes, Amazon Echo began selling at the same time, with many of the original Jibo hyped features and at a lower price point.
Do hospitals mismanage support for vulnerable older adults? And we wonder why people, including doctors, avoid hospitals. We knew that an older adult going into the hospital experiences or departs with an unwanted side effect. Half a million per year acquire C.Difficile in hospitals -- costing $4.8 billion; ICU risk of death is 35% higher for elderly. And MRSA has a 12-month death rate of between 20 and 35% -- with the most vulnerable, you guessed it, the elderly. But did you know that one-third of hospital patients over age 70 and half of the patients leave the hospital more disabled than when they arrived? Question raised: what about appointed or actual advocates when elderly patients are admitted – is someone present or appointed by the hospital who will observe care, including vigilance about hand-washing or ICU treatment– perhaps the state-by-state Care Act address this in a future update.
So you read a headline and say, what, what?? But of course we regularly find ourselves incredulous. Can that headline be accurate? What did that study say? Who did they survey to get that result? This has been a particularly bad week for distortion headlines – and not about politics, actually. These are about topics seniors and families would care about and be disappointed when they read more. Let’s start with the Wall Street Journal article title:
AGE-WELL, in partnership with the Global Council on Alzheimer’s Disease (GCAD), Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, Inc., Aging2.0 Local | Toronto, the Ontario Brain Institute, and the Women’s Brain Health Initiative is proud to host a pitch competition this July in Toronto, ON Canada.
