New, Wearable Gadgets Designed With Seniors — Not Whippersnappers — in Mind

Not all the new, techy gadgets are geared toward über runners and the athletic-minded.

One company has created a wearable monitor that can masquerade as a watch or piece of jewelry, but allows families to keep tabs on the movement and sleep patterns of elderly loved ones.

The Care Predict Tempo is a modern gadget designed for older users who may want families to help keep an eye on their health and activity habits. (Image via Care Predict)

The Care Predict Tempo is a much more modern gadget than the bulky, boring "life alert" systems of the past; if your older relatives are fearful of being grouped with the "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up" crowd, this may be an ideal device for them.

The embedded sensor detects motion – walking, running, sitting, standing or lying down – and location while the software learns how the user typically moves and what figures out the wearer's typical activity range.

The Tempo comes with interchangeable bands and uses beacon technology to understand its location in the home. The Care Predict website explains:

"(The system) takes motion type, speed, number of steps, duration, and frequency – and combines it with location data. For instance, lying for two hours in the living room may be a nap, while lying in the bathroom would notify you that something might be wrong."

The beacons will connect wirelessly to the wearable device and the cloud, transmitting location data to the secure server and the loved ones with access to the account (Image via Care Predict).

The beacons are small and battery-operated; designed to simply plug into a standard outlet, then uses the home's wireless Internet connection to send information to the company's cloud hub to be analyzed on secure servers—- the information is only accessible to the people the users hand-select.

"This isn’t a FitBit for granny,” Satish Movva, Care Predict's Founder, said. Movva told TheBlaze the product will be available in the fall of 2014.

(H/T: MIT Technology Review)

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