I'm pretty proud to share the gift I'm able to give my Dad this year—likely one of the best things I could ever do for him and for our family. Hopefully, it's one that will soon benefit you and yours, too.

A couple years ago, I realized my Dad was facing a lot of changes—not all of them easy. I had coffee with a couple friends, and soon to be co-founders, Evan Schwartz and Lasse Hamre. I shared some of what was going on, and they totally got it. To varying degrees, our families were all struggling with ways to stay connected with the older adults in our lives without being intrusive, to help, to work collaboratively on solutions. Make no mistake—helping our folks was—and is—a privilege that we all embrace with full hearts. But it can also be emotionally demanding and logistically complicated. It can require RN-level medical fluency; and, at times, it becomes a full-time communications job between our parents, numerous medical professionals, and close family members.

We realized that there was a technological solution that would be incredibly helpful to us and to our many, many friends in similar boats—it just didn't exist yet. Not to punt care, but to do what great tech does best—simply and intuitively support and enrich the human experience; and in this case, the experience of aging. Our respective backgrounds as tech entrepreneurs gave us a pretty incredible network. We set out to build it, and so we have. Introducing, Aloe Care Health.

I'm proud to announce that today (literally today and over the next few days), the Aloe Care pilot is going live. Aloe Care is now in the homes of our teams’ parents and grandparents. At its essence, Aloe Care is a voice-activated table-top communications' hub allowing us to effortlessly connect with our parents; it's a fall-detection system; it is a voice-activated emergency response system, should the need arise; and the connected app provides an intuitive, thought-through mechanism for care collaboration and management. What’s more, Lasse’s passion for using “IoT for good,” means that the built-in machine learning will snag anomalies faster than the human eye—helping us to swiftly identify and address issues like cognitive impairment. Please note: I said nothing of a necklace or a watch or anything our folks have to wear. Why? Turns out, 86% of people who have those devices don't wear them 24-7. Whether it's because they signal fragility or they're forgotten, the “why” is irrelevant—they don't work if they are not on.

Soon, I’ll share images of the hub and screenshots of the app. I’m so proud of what our product team has created. They too are care-givers and have been thinking through the design and functionality vigilantly through that lens: factoring in things like hearing and/or vision diminution, physical instabilities, arthritis. Critical too: what they’ve built is beautiful, discrete, powerful, and of course, secure. That said, design and functionality at Aloe Care are iterative, not top-down. As our families live with the hardware and use the apps, we will be learning and evolving.

I realize that I've likely shared much of this with you already, and so here is my real reason for writing. Evan, Lasse, our mighty team and I want to thank you. This is only the beginning and we'll keep you apprised of our progress as we prepare for wider consumer release later this year. But we would never have gotten this dream off the ground without your support. As a wise person in our office said earlier today, "All of us are better than any one of us."  

So thank you for being part of our "all." Our dual aims—helping older people stay connected, safe, and dignified while giving peace-of-mind and a lighter load to the people who care for them—are much closer today.

If you would like to know more, add your family to our next round of testers, or join our team, please drop us a line partners@getaloecare.com. It's always great to hear from you.

Best,

Ray