NIA Small Business Showcase: Care Daily
Almost 6 million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer’s disease, and 16 million people in the country are providing unpaid care for family members with dementia. Many of these caregivers experience significant stress, depression, and early mortality. Moreover, as dementia caregivers develop mental health problems, survival times for the people in their care get shorter. It is estimated that Alzheimer’s and related dementias cost the nation $305 billion in 2020, and this cost may increase to $1.1 trillion by 2050.
Families need solutions to help them care for aging loved ones at home, and seniors need low-cost technologies that keep them out of nursing homes. As people age, they may fall, get lost, or forget their medicine, and they may feel lonely, anxious, or depressed. Seniors and their caregivers need home care solutions that reduce their anxiety and depression and increase their sense of well-being.
Care Daily is making home care affordable with a solution called Caregiver, designed to help seniors age more safely at home and bring peace of mind to families. Care Daily has considerable experience in building channel partnerships with large service providers that have millions of customers and that can market such products under their own brand. Care Daily has signed a large distribution agreement with Quil, the digital health joint venture between Comcast and Independence Health Group. Quil has announced the commercial launch of Quil Assure, which is powered by Care Daily.
Care Daily is addressing the growing $3.6 billion annual market for personal emergency response systems (PERS) with a more comprehensive solution. The company estimates that 5.18 million PERS units will be sold in 2022. The new solution will directly augment this market, because Caregiver incorporates the functionality of PERS and combines it with three other technologies that caregivers value: wearables that measure vital signs and falls, passive sensors placed within the home, and smart speakers.
Care Daily’s bot-powered, time-series machine learning (ML) framework enables the company to create, deploy, and rapidly iterate on new artificial intelligence (AI) services at a rate that is 16 times faster than that of other companies. Care Daily has used this to commercially deploy services that address the top issues that seniors and their caregivers face today, including providing fall prediction and detection, wandering alerts, sleep monitoring, and medication adherence reminders. End users can interact with the system through their Apple and Android devices, Alexa, Google Home, and text messaging. Service providers and administrators interact with the system through the Care Daily Dashboard and the Bot Lab, which allows commercial and research partners to add their own AI services to the platform. Care Daily’s software supports more than 200 types of devices, connecting through industry standard protocols such as Zigbee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and video. The software is secured end-to-end with industry-standard security, incorporating Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance with administrative processes to open up new health care channels to market.
The company’s real-world research is helping to refine its home care solutions, as seen in scientifically validated results from several NIA-funded randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with the University of California, Berkeley.
Company Milestones
Scientific
- 2018: Conducted focus groups with caregivers to shape Caregiver’s design
- 2019: Began ongoing RCT of Caregiver 2.0 in 69 homes
- 2020: Began ongoing RCT of Caregiver 3.0 in 292 homes nationwide
- 2021: Completed two RCTs demonstrating reduced anxiety and depression and improvement in emotional well-being among caregivers at homes where Caregiver was installed
- 2022: Conducted additional data analysis and determined that Caregiver protects sleep quality for the active group
Business
- 2009: People Power founded by Gene Wang and David Moss
- 2010: People Power awarded Phase I and Phase II SBIR grants from the Department of Energy
- 2013: People Power Presence becomes the top trending app in Apple App Store, covered by USA Today, Fox Business Live, the Wall Street Journal, and Good Morning America
- 2018: People Power is awarded a Fast-Track SBIR grant from NIH and releases Caregiver 1.0
- 2020: People Power acquires Tri-Cura, a software provider to home care agencies
- 2021: People Power plans commercial launches with large service providers and care organizations
- 2022: People Power rebrands as Care Daily to align with the company’s focus on providing daily care for seniors
Financial Overview
Care Daily has raised $20 million in equity financing from venture, strategic investors, and angel investors. The company is currently raising additional funding to expand sales, marketing, and product development.
Intellectual Property
Care Daily has unique expertise in architecting flexible cloud computing and edge computing environments for ML services to operate efficiently and at scale on top of real-time sources of time-series data. Going further, the team has researched and developed time-series ML algorithms within this environment to classify lifestyle and occupancy patterns, fill in missing data, and identify abnormalities. Care Daily currently has three patents granted in the United States and China and four patents pending.
Product Development and Regulatory Strategy
Care Daily is an experienced developer with software and apps that have supported 1.2 million users. About 3.5 million devices have been hosted on Care Daily’s cloud software, which currently receives around 13.6 terabytes of data each month. The company’s services have passed multiple security audits and penetration tests with tier-1 brands and are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation and HIPAA. The Care Daily cloud offers more than 250 open APIs out of 415 total APIs, and the company will continue to develop new APIs as it integrates with new channel partners and new devices. Care Daily’s servers have not had any unplanned outages since 2017. The company achieved 99.9% in uptime reliability in 2020 and 2021.
Commercialization Strategy
Care Daily’s commercialization strategy is to enable service providers and care agencies to increase their revenue and customer base while sharing the recurring monthly fees.
Service providers typically have millions of customers and frequently sell through their own channel partners, including retailers, health maintenance organizations, and online marketing channels. Care Daily’s solutions are rebranded for tier-1 service providers to improve their brand value and relationships with end users.
Company Details
Palo Alto, CA
Industry: Digital Health & Sensing Technologies
Management Team:
- Founder and Chairman: Gene Wang
- Founder and CEO: David Moss
- Senior Vice President/General Manager: Chris Ebert
- Chief Financial Officer: Carol Bowers
- Chief Experience Officer: Jason Caslavka
Point of Contact:
Gene Wang
gene@peoplepowerco.com
(855) 712-9833