Totemic is interesting to me, since one of my close relatives spent five hours on the floor of their house after falling, as she could never remember to carry her cellphone (hard habit to acquire at 90 years old...). And of course, she could have lost consciousness, which would render the cellphone useless.
That said, I wonder how can they have a single device for the whole house, and how it works for harder floors, like ceramic tile, which doesn't make much of a sound. Seems to me that something so sensitive would be triggered by way too many false positives.
It would be interesting to see their technology. As I understand, many falls aren't what we think of in the general sense of "fall". Many are slow fall to the ground, for example struggle to get out of a chair and go down on one knee, then to the floor.
Totemic cofounder here. We actually don't just detect "falls" as a moment in time, but also use patterns to figure out things along the line of someone being on the floor in a place they usually aren't and they're not able to get up.
Interesting. Very good idea. I work in a large teaching hospital and review all admissions everyday. We get a ton of patients admitted with rhabdo or break/fracture every week. Good luck!
Dr. Cathy Bodine at Denver-Anschutz is doing this exact thing. It's not on the website but Totemic should contact her. They were using the Pebble previous to that company auto-bricking last year. She has had a lot of students working with that tech and using it out in the local community to great success. Dr. Sliker is also very very good with this stuff.
Cofounder of Totemic here. Just to add detail, it should be corrected in the article now but we don't use sound. Just as you say, we believe one major advantage of our system is not requiring behavior change on the part of seniors when that can be really difficult even if they want to because of memory and other issues.
We'll likely use one device for small apartments and have to scale up to 2-3+ for larger houses much like Eero does.
Cofounder of Totemic here! Austen is right! We use a variety of wireless sensors to monitor people's movements. We can do much more than detection of falls at a singular moment in time this way and we actually will be using a singular device for small apartments and multiple for larger houses (think like Eero).
That said, I wonder how can they have a single device for the whole house, and how it works for harder floors, like ceramic tile, which doesn't make much of a sound. Seems to me that something so sensitive would be triggered by way too many false positives.