“I’ve fall and I can’t get up.”
The familiar refrain from the 1989 Lifecall commercial went viral.
Entrepreneur Jacob Moshinsky is looking to modernize the solutions for elderly and children in a similar “Lifecall” predicament. His company, NurtureWatch, takes a crack at life saving smart watches. Naturally, Grit Daily reached out to get a better look at his work.
- You have your own interesting background in tech. Please share more on that.
My career began in confectionery, working for Cadbury chocolates giving me the foundation in product and pricing. The skills allowed me to move into Rogers Wireless to manage a multi-million long distance product line in Toronto helping it to record growth during the 2008-2009 recession. Thereafter I managed a marketing portfolio for bundled products (cellphone, cable and internet) by creating unique, attractive and differentiating marketing strategies to attract new customers.
After a few years, I moved to TELUS where I sunset the old IDen network (two-way voice closed network system) and launched the Push-to-Talk portfolio overcoming significant learning challenges from both my side and customers. The challenges allowed by creative background to translate and present the new technology to both senior leadership within TELUS and to heads of businesses.
Overall, we retained a vast number of customers from our legacy network and successfully managed a unique SaaS business oriented product for business that included compatibility with both iOS and Android mobile devices and a separate Dispatch product. Overcoming significant challenges in both technical and business this set-off my entrepreneur desire to create a technology that could only have helped my late uncle but also make a difference for our elderly population
- Why should people bother to monitor so much?
One of every three falls results in serious injury to the elderly that could result in death. Smart, connected medical devices could save the US healthcare system more than $30 billion a year (of $3.2 trillion). We, kids of elders, do our best to check in on our parents but because of our busy lives (families, work, and travel) we have a bigger dependency on remote monitoring technology that is not intrusive. Elders are living longer and independently and their health is not usually improving thus we need a new, discreet and non-intrusive to monitor them to avoid a death from an accident.
- What is this technology’s future? Are there integrations?
The future of the NurtureWatch and wearables is in artificial intelligence to predict erratic behaviours before they happen, ultimately getting medical attention to both elderly and people with special needs right when it’s needed most. Future integrations could lie in sharing live, remote, emergency occurrences to our health practitioners from our wrist without having to exit our homes. Ultimately providing remote, diagnosis care from the comfort of our living room
- How do people, both elderly and those with special needs, benefit from NurtureWatch?
The NurtureWatch provides a peace of mind to kids and caregivers while restoring dignity to the elderly by using a fashionable watch – versus an ugly pendent that yells “Look at me, I’m old!!”. Peace of mind is provided through the NurtureWatch features like fall detection that immediately alerts loved ones of fall, shows the users location on a map, within the loved ones’ smartphone and, most importantly, it automatically initiates a phone call. In case of emergencies this allows loved ones to immediately triage the situation remotely. Just in case the NurtureWatch user is not responding (it comes with an auto-answer function) the heart rate can be checked to ensure they’re still alive. In short, the fashionable NurtureWatch could save peoples lives.
