PreSafe Blog

Disrupting the 100-year old nursing home industry is more challenging than disrupting the taxi-cab monopolies taken on by Uber.

During the baby boomer years, it was an oft repeated proclamation given to any auditorium filled with eager, fresh-faced, first-year law school students on orientation day: “Look to the person on your left, and the one on your right. One of you will be gone by the end of this year.”

Wandering is complicated. For example, Milo was staying at a Brookdale Assisted Care facility, Horizon Bay, in Chandler Arizona. He'd been diagnosed with vascular dementia. One day, Milo, who often went for short walks in the neighborhood of the facility, crossed the street where the Chandler Regional Hospital was, went into the emergency care wing, and asked to see a doctor about his memory problems.

In an interview that PreSafe had with Kimberly Kelly, board member of the National Association for Search and Rescue, she pointed out that you need to have at least three days to find and rescue someone who has wandered. And the statistics bear that out.

In building PreSafe, we started with the assumption that locating the person who was wandering was the only concern, and we decided by build a GPS locator that had a much longer battery life than what we could find on the market.

Sometimes, we're asked "What's so different about PreSafe, a Personal Safety Beacon that protects people from the dangers of hypothermia, heat stroke, hard falls, and getting lost, compared to generic GPS trackers on the market right now?"

Over 15 million Americans provide unpaid care for a person with Alzheimer's disease or other dementias. And in 2013, 15.5 million caregivers provided an estimated 17.7 billion hours of unpaid care valued at more than $220 billion.