BeClose turns the home security platform into an activity monitoring system

Buoyed by the promises of mHealth, entrepreneurs from other industries are venturing into the healthcare landscape, bringing new concepts and tools that could change the way healthcare is delivered, measured, even defined.

One such business is BeClose, a Vienna, Va.-based startup that partnered with Alarm.com in 2009 to create a home surveillance system that aims to replace the "I've fallen and I can't get up" solution with something more complete.

"Panic buttons work only 20 percent of the time, and that's not good enough," says Liddy Manson, the company's president.

BeClose's home monitoring solution makes use of a low-power, low-grade wireless network developed by the home security industry that connects a plugged-in "bay station" with small sensors placed around the house. Those sensors are used to track movement, and can be configured to detect such things as bathroom visits, sitting and sleeping habits, the opening of refrigerators and medicine cabinets, activity patterns around the house and so-called "comings and goings."

Manson, whose Huffington Post blog documents her experiences as the caregiver of a senior parent, recently shared the stage at the Partners Healthcare Connected Health Symposium in Boston with two heavyweights in the telehealth spectrum, Jasper zu Pulitz, president of Bosch Healthcare Systems, and Roy Schoenberg, CEO of American Well Systems.

And while Bosch Healthcare specializes in the home-monitoring device network and American Well has a global footprint in telehealth systems, Manson is quick to point out that BeClose isn't collecting medical or biometric data for clinical use – it's capturing and charting activity trends for caregivers, starting with family members and friends.

"We're very focused on wellness and safety," she says.

Therein, she says, lie some of the advantages of the BeClose system. For starters, it's not reliant on expensive medical devices placed in the home or broadband access, which many seniors don't want or know how to use. It doesn't overwhelm the caregiver with medical data that may or may not be useful, but charts and spots anomalies in activity patterns that form the basis for any wellness program.

Manson says BeClose was launched with a focus on the consumer market, appealing to seniors and their caregivers. In the roughly 20 months since it was made commercially available, she says, it's been noticed by others who want to stay at home but need a round-the-clock link to caregivers, such as those with disabilities (both developmental and physical) or chronic conditions.

Lately she's been talking to medical device manufacturers and telehealth vendors about partnerships, and health plans and healthcare providers are knocking on the door as well.

"If you're doing chronic disease management, you want to monitor trends," says Manson, who also has a diabetic daughter.

At the Connected Health Symposium, held this past October in Boston, Manson talked about being "in the happiness and safety business," rather than telehealth. She said some of today's home monitoring systems can get bogged down with complicated and expensive devices that take in measurements and results but don't do anything with them.

Andrew Watson, a physician in the UPMC system and medical director of its Center for Connected Health, pointed out that the consumer electronic market is growing faster than any aspect of healthcare, and said entrepreneurs in the home monitoring market will have to be creative, launching "new modalities that are more evolved than boxes."

Schoenberg, of American Well, agreed, saying home-based monitoring and telehealth services need to look beyond the act of capturing data and the idea that an end-user has one relationship with one doctor for all healthcare needs. Today's healthcare landscape, he said, requires solutions that deliver healthcare to the user, rather than requiring the user to go to the doctor's office, clinic or hospital. That requires providers to place emphasis on the relationship with the patient, rather than the simple act of gathering data.

For Manson, that means creating a platform that produces observations, rather than numbers.

"Healthcare providers are so infatuated with data – data, data, data," she said at the symposium. "It's really making sense of data and passing analysis back and forth" that enables home-monitoring platforms to be successful."
 

Eric Wicklund

Editor of mHIMSS.org

Follow Eric on Twitter @eriwick