SmartHealth @ Home Blog

Caring for members of the family has been around throughout history. What has changed in the last fifty years is the longevity of aging parents and the fact that many family members do not live close to their parents. This makes the ability to give physical and emotional support to improve parent wellness even more critical. The truth is, just because you don’t live right around the corner doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to your parents well being as caregivers from a distance. One of the biggest ways you can help is by supporting their emotional health.

The Importance of Emotional Health

Emotional health is defined as a state where you are in control of your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. One of the most important tips for caregivers is to help your parents to be emotionally healthy. It is vital to recognize that this emotional health is every bit as important for your aging parents as their physical health. Even more important, it is something that you can contribute support to even from a distance. Helping them to know that even if they aren’t in total control of what is happening to them physically, they know they can keep a perspective about it with your support. You can help to improve parent wellness by supporting their needs for contact and encouraging them to engage with outside people and activities.

Emotional Health and Isolation

As parents age often they become isolated as they find themselves outliving close friends. Family becomes even more important to combat loneliness. Do you know what kinds of books they read or movies they enjoy? Being able to discuss these, or even send them to them, can be a way to stay connected and help them participate in your life. Here at Nclaves we recognize the importance of this and encourage you to use the family relationship tools to stay connected. Video chats on a regular basis to keep in touch with the rhythm of your parent’s life are just one of the ways you can be caregivers from a distance.

There are all kinds of great tips for caregivers of their aging parents, whether they are caring nearby or from a distance. Staying emotionally connected, encouraging them to engage with others and their community and supporting decisions that reflect the physical changes in their lives are just a few of these ways.

Nutrition and Medications too

Besides the emotional connections, it is equally important to make sure that parents are taking their medications on time and watching their diet on a regular basis. Nclaves has all those tools too. Imagine using video chat to talk about the last movie you saw together and intermix that with smooth quick blurb about importance of taking medications on time.

The wonders of today’s technology can do more than keep us living longer lives, they can help us live active connected ones too.

Ms. Madeline Vann writes in her article on EverydayHealth – “To be completely healthy, you must take care of not only your physical health, but your emotional health, too. If one is neglected, the other will suffer.”

Many other scientific studies, for a long time, have emphasized the same important fact.

Then why is it that, even today, most of the Internet services focus mainly on physical health indicators such as blood pressure and weight ? Won’t it be better to have a solution that combines tools to improve both emotional health and physical well-being under a single umbrella? Better yet, the same solution can also include nutritional diary so that one can evaluate the effect of personal food intake and understand that impact too ?

Let us also look at the demographic shift around the world. The senior population is rapidly growing and more seniors are staying alone. In US alone, 40 million boomers retired last year. This is a world-wide phenomenon. If emotional health is important for all, it is critically essential for the independently living seniors.

Therefore, Nclaves provides a single environment that combines a number of tools and technologies to measure, monitor and improve emotional health as well as physical well-being. It takes a family-wide approach to improve total health so that members can engage and assist each other as and when necessary. Read more…

There is undoubtedly more investment and more technology innovation on the patient-care side than keeping people healthy. In fact, just a few weeks ago, we were in discussion with a VC with MBA from a well-known east coast school. Since our Internet service, Nclaves, is aimed at better control of personal health at home, the discussion revolved around personal health devices to be used at home and how they reduce cost, improve productivity and so forth.

Her immediate reaction was, “I don’t use anything like that myself. I don’t know anyone at my age who does that regularly either. There is no business here”.

We were speechless, to say the least. We asked her why she doesn’t use any such devices to keep an eye on her own health although she does use similar devices in her car to keep it healthy – to make sure there is enough engine oil, enough gas in the tank and so forth. That sort of clicked in her mind, but not enough to get the money flowing.

VC’s will generally say they want to invest in a vicodin. To us, the lack of recognition that we indeed need technologies and solutions to routinely monitor our own health is in itself a triple-vicodin of a problem, let alone a simple vicodin.

Today’s HealthCare language seems to revolve mostly around a patient. Ask 10 people what they think of the term “care” in the context of a person, and 8 of them will immediately think of a “patient”. To care for a person is most often thought of as patient-care.

On the other hand, ask the same people what they think of “care” in the context of say, a car. They will talk about how they keep the oil at the correct level, keep the tire pressure current and perhaps how they keep the interiors clean and nice. To care of a car is most often thought of as keeping the car “healthy”.

It is sad that the term car-care conjures up an image of keeping a care well, ahead of something going wrong, while the term person-care is mostly interpreted to mean patient care, something to be done after a person has had some medical situation.

It seams that the language of HealthCare is driven mostly from the medical point of view – the patients, the doctors, the hospitals. That would be more akin to the car-related language being driven from a garage’s point of view. Is that right ? Shouldn’t the language for a person’s health be centered on a healthy person, just as the language for a car’s health is centered on the car itself, not its garage ?

Nclaves provides an environment to monitor and improve health and wellness at home on a family-wide basis so that family members can reduce cost of care and “be healthy”.

A person’s own sense of safety and security, particularly when living alone, has direct impact on the person’s health. According to a survey by the Australian Beureau of Statistics, “Feeling unsafe is a significant issue for many people and affects individual and community mental health and wellbeing”. As the aging population continues to grow around the world and the global economy drives the family members to disperse, we need to find ways to improve safety and security from a distance. It is true that services such as 911 are available in developed countries but that is not the case in many places. Family members must rely on each other to provide the sense of safety among themselves.

The Digital Home technologies can provide dispersed family members to observe and perhaps control digital appliances remotely. For example, security lights or window blinds in an elder’s home can be observed remotely by multiple family members. When an unexpected event occurs, an automatic alert can be generated and sent out to a predetermined list of individuals. They can take additional steps as necessary.

Recently, a story of an US army personnel appeared in a newspaper. While on duty in Iraq, he regularly communicated with his mom over the Internet. One day she did not go-online as expected and therefore he called the neighbors. The neighbors went to the mom’s home and knocked on her door. They found she needed some medical help and then took the necessary steps.

This is just one example. Of course, there are services such as LifeAlert(r). Digital home technologies, combined with the Internet and/or mobile phones, can take the intra-family support structure to the next level. It will help not only the elders and their family members but also the society in general.

There is a significant movement towards monitoring health at home. A number of devices, technologies and standards are in place so that individuals can conveniently monitor different health parameters at home.

Will people actually use these devices regularly ?

There needs to be a sense of engagement if we want these devices to be a part of the routine life (daily, weekly, — whatever). They must not come across as a drudgery that “has to be taken care of”. For example, consider simple things like flossing the teeth. Even though we know it is necessary and the dentists keep telling us to do so, many will skip it because it is a drudgery. Then think of health measurements like weight and blood pressure. Will we track them regularly ? Unless a person is already a patient and therefore has to take these measurements, it is quite possible that we will more often skip it than not.

Health monitoring at home needs to be simple, engaging and a part of daily life for it to be truly useful. What can we do to make it a regular habit ? Nclaves’ SmartHealth@Home approach relies on the loving relationships among family members to cajole each other and make health tracking a routine habit.

There is a strong concern that health applications are not resulting in healthier behavior. There are many mobile health apps (8000+) but the jury is still out whether these many applications have really made much of a difference.

Based on the surveys and one-on-one meetings we have had related to our Nclaves Internet service, we have learned that even if the application is really useful and friendly, users do not use it unless it becomes part and parcel of their daily life, for one reason or another. They would like a collection of their health information available to them at the push of a button. Today we have one application to monitor glucose level, another to monitor weight and yet another website to go to for nutritional information. That is a hassle and a big reason for their disengagement.

Another point is perhaps a little controversial yet important to note. Today, almost all the health related discussions and applications appear to gravitate towards a “patient”. That is, most users engage in observing, monitoring, and fixing their health after the fact. It is like watching a bank account after receiving an account overdrawn notice. Services like Mint (mint.com) are aimed at helping users to avoid unhappy consequences regarding money matters. We need a “Mint” for health.

If we respond to these needs – ex-ante (before the fact), routine, push-of-a-button style engagement with a variety of health information in one secure place – then it is a step in the right direction. Based on the user feedback, Nclaves is taking that step with its SmartHealth @ Home approach.

The term MedicalHome has been used a lot. The emphasis is on patient-centric technologies that are (or can be) installed in the home. However, not everyone is a patient. You can be perfectly healthy and yet have many health-related technologies at home – for example, bluetooth enabled personal health devices, home environment detectors such as carbon monoxide alarms and so on. For such homes, where the emphasis is on health, not patient, what should we call it ? HealthyHome ? HealthfulHome ? HealthwiseHome ?

Words matter. “Medical” implies a patient. If the health care battle is shifting more towards preventive health maintenance then the term should emphasize Health rather than Medical. What do you think ? Do you agree ?

Nclaves takes a health-centric approach to tackle the rising cost of health care. That is perhaps a smarter approach to reduce cost, improve quality of life and you can do that in the convenience of your own home.

There are many excellent articles that explain the impact of emotional health on the overall health. It says “… there’s now solid science behind the correlation of emotional experience and a host of diseases and health conditions, from heart disease and depression to obesity and chronic pain“.

Clearly, emotional health is an integral part of the overall human health and wellness.

When family members disperse for one reason or another, the geographical distances make it difficult for them to maintain and strengthen relationship bonds. That in turn affects emotional health, particularly for the independent seniors. That, according to the article above, will have strong impact on “heart disease, depression and obesity”.

Although there are many personal health devices to measure various physical health parameters, such as blood pressure, the quantification of emotional health remains illusive. If we cannot quantify, it is that much more difficult to monitor. That puts us between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, we know emotional health does impact overall health but on the other, we don’t have clear means to quantify.

One solution for this dilemma would be to have tools that help family members engage with each other routinely and then make those tools an integral part of the total health at home solution. That is what Nclaves attempts to do. It views tools such as audio/video chat and family tree as an integral part of health and well-being. These tools are as much a part of the total health @ home solution as the tools to measure and monitor weight and blood pressure.

Health in the holistic sense must include emotional health as well as physical health. A number of devices are being announced to measure physical health parameters such as weight and blood-pressure. However, managing emotional health remains more of an art than science. The classic question, “if you cannot measure it, how can you manage it” aptly explains the difficulty of managing and improving emotional health. This is a particularly important issue to remember when addressing independent living in America.

We also have to think of the effect of Home environment on health. For example, Carbon Monoxide and Radon gases in a home are dangerous. Lack of personal safety and security can create stressful environment, particularly for those living alone at home.

Thus, a comprehensive solution for improving Health @ Home has to recognize that Health is not just physical health and that Home environment is an equally important aspect too. We have to think of Health @ Home outside-the-box and only then we will be able to build comprehensive solutions. Nclaves‘ SmartHealth @ Home is one such solution.