Today, most of us take keeping in touch with each other for granted. Some might argue we do too much communicating: listen in on the conversation between your teen and a friend he or she has left only five minutes ago. We share status updates no Facebook (News - Alert). We text. We e-mail. We send each other photos. We read each other’s Tweets. We can even use our smart phones to keep track of each other’s physical locations.

Most of this communications sharing takes place between younger adults, however, and older family members who are not tech-savvy may be left out of the loop. If Grandma, who still lives alone, is unwilling to carry a smartphone and throws up her hands at the thought of using the Facebook account you created for her, it may feel a bit like an information black hole. Is she OK? Is she eating? Taking her medication?

A company called Lively has introduced an interesting home monitoring system that can help younger family members feel confident about grandma or grandpa’s quality of life in a very non-intrusive way. Lively offers a system of sensors, coupled with a smartphone app, which can ensure younger family members that there are no interruptions in an elderly person’s healthy routines.

Photo courtesy Shutterstock
It involves little wireless sensors placed around the house anywhere they are needed: on the fridge door, on a closet door, on the front door, on a medicine bottle, or even on a set of car keys. These small sensors report into the main “hub” sensor, which has a cell connection that allows it to communicate with Lively’s cloud. Lively then performs data analysis on its cloud servers to look for breaks in patterns (i.e., the front door hasn’t been opened in a while, indicating that the elderly family member has not left the house; or the refrigerator hasn’t been opened all day, indicating that person member may not be eating properly.)

Lively creates icon-based updates in a phone app for family members or friends authorized to receive them, broken down by categories: “medications,” “food and drink,” or “getting out,” for example. Younger family members can glance at the “dashboard” and get a quick update and assurance that everything’s OK, or that something is slipping, or choose to receive alerts when something is off.

Lively also collects updates from other family members and friends and condenses them into a “Lively Gram,” with photos and greetings, that is sent to the elder family member once every two weeks.

Lively’s founders say that it’s the unobtrusiveness of the system that will likely appeal to all family members.

“Lively is not 'big brother' monitoring and doesn't trigger an emergency response,” say the company’s founders. “It takes care of the emotional connection that's essential as we age for a feeling of safety and healthy well-being.”

You can watch a video of the Lively solution here on Vimeo.