Amulyte (YC S13) is Building a Better Lifeline For Seniors on the Move

Seems like a smart move considering 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day. Hopefully they're in it for the long haul.

It will be interesting to see what the marketing strategy will be.

Sounded good, until I heard about the monthly fee.

I don't think this will go very far, as there are probably other companies going after this market without any extra fees.

Also, the battery life needs to be at least a month.

It would seem a much simpler solution would be feasible. A small GSM device that is essentially powered off until it is needed, at which time it would be booted up and begin sending GPS coordinates via SMS. If you wanted higher reliability, you could look into the FM-based system that LoJack uses, but either way, constant communication seems unnecessary.

Is there anything like this out there already? With good battery life.

I'm super-impressed and really happy to see this recent batch of YC companies tackling some very underserved and unsexy problems.

While Amulyte is not a new idea, I do think their product is a much-needed improvement on what's existed for some time. But will that improvement be enough for it to be a widely adopted product? I don't think so. Products offering similar solutions have been around with moderate levels of success, and neither seniors nor their caretakers are technologically savvy enough to see an accelerometer or self-quantification as selling points. And while selling to nursing homes might seem a good idea, they're already relatively well-monitored settings that account for only 20% of deaths due to falls in people ages 65yo+ [0].

I think this is mostly a marketing issue, and an interesting one. This is a morbid product. Buying it acknowledges to some degree that you're old, and on your way out. It's not like life insurance where you buy it once and don't think about it. Nor is it like taking medications that are contributing to your health. A product like this serves as a constant reminder of your fragility while not providing any immediately obvious benefit. Imagine putting it around your neck every day. Beyond the inherent psychological barriers that a product of this nature can create, marketing for this type of solution just hasn't seemed to help. Life Alert, a wear-around-your-neck monitor for the elderly that's been around for a long time, has been known for its "I've fallen and I can't get up!" campaign [1]. What elderly person or caregiver would ever want to relate to someone in that commercial?

I don't know what the answer to that problem is yet. How do you get people to acknowledge the eventual death of their beloved elderly and push them to be proactive in taking preventative measures without using scare tactics? I'm not sure, but coincidentally, I finally got to reading the article Slow Ideas by Atul Gawande [2] this morning that touches on similar problems -- problems that are insidious and have no immediate solution. He seems to strengthen PG's points on doing things that don't scale [3]. In particular, he talks about how marketing efforts, efforts that scaled, in India to combat cholera were unsuccessful, and how opting for the door-to-door method resulted in significant drops in mortality. The message of the article was that these problems require more than just slick ads and pamphlets. They require changing the norms, changing the way people perceive these problems. And from his experience, the most efficient and successful way of doing that is to do things that do not scale. Maybe that's the answer.

A product like this isn't just a shiny new toy someone orders from Amazon, or backs on Kickstarter. This touches on some very deep problems in our society and its views on preventative health, mostly that we don't take it seriously. I think a company like Amulyte should really focus its efforts on creating an effective marketing strategy. They may have the most advanced monitor in the world, but that won't tear down many of the barriers that exist for this type of product. And if they can crack that marketing problem, then there's a lot more success out there to be had. Some food for thought, Amulyte guys. Good luck! I'll definitely be watching closely.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Falls/nursing.h...

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQlpDiXPZHQ

[2] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_...

[3] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html