How AI-Enabled Apartments and Homes Can Change Senior Living for Good
Caspar.AI provides safe, healthy, and engaged living environments for residents of retirement communities. The system provides residents with artificially intelligent privacy-preserving care while managers receive lower operating costs and increased efficiency.
Caring for our seniors using Artificial Intelligence
"Even for us in our golden years, the Caspar technology was not hard to pick up," - Audrey, Revel Nevada Resident
In the midst of a global pandemic that affects senior citizens at such disproportionately high rates, many families have found it hard to care for their older relatives from a safe distance. Luckily, computer science gurus Ashutosh Saxena and David Cheriton have invented a way for senior care to be automated, thus minimizing unnecessary interactions for the elderly. Caspar aims to bring peace of mind to senior residents and their families, providing artificially intelligent care that has the potential to revolutionize life for residents in assisted-care facilities.
Smart buildings that are equipped with Caspar enhance the comfort and health of occupants by allowing the apartment or house itself to act as a caregiver. One of the many impressive Caspar features designed to improve the life of senior citizens is fall detection, made possible by tracking daily movement and sleep levels. Another important feature of the system is intelligent reminders for residents to take their medicine, if they have left the stove on, or if there is a stranger by their door. On top of this, CasparAdapt and CasparSense continually learn the behavior of residents, tracking user actions and utilizing short-term and long-term learning to adapt over time to the resident’s preferences. To make Caspar more widely accessible, the built-in caregiver has a simple user interface that is controllable with a smartphone or voice commands. Also, the system’s software integrates to the building's IoT platform and its user interface is simple to learn and use, controllable with a smartphone or voice commands.
From Stanford AI research to market
We were connected to Ash and David through our mutual friend Joyo Wijaya, a Venture Partner of our firm, with whom we have close relationships and often co-invest in deals. The two founders have immense knowledge in computer science and are bringing their AI research to the market to improve senior living. After meeting them and looking into market size and competitors, we are convinced that there is a big opportunity in the senior living space and Caspar provides a badly needed solution. The pandemic has shown that senior housing staff is very scarce and we believe the demand for smart homes is increasing rapidly. Homes with artificially intelligent care will soon become the norm, as the acceleration of tech adoption forces the operators and developers of retirement communities to rethink their current strategies and offerings.
“Developers, owners, and managers of communities need to be ready to answer the demand." - Ashutosh Saxena
Technology deep-dive
Though both Ash and David are decorated thought leaders in the AI field, their backgrounds are not exactly identical. Ash received his Ph.D. in machine learning and has spent much of his career working on automating everyday tasks. On the other hand, David is a world-famous researcher in networking and distributed systems, also known for his keen ability in identifying big market opportunities. The combination between Ash’s knowledge in machine learning and David’s expertise in distributed systems comes together perfectly to create Caspar, a company dependent on both concepts. The company’s connection to machine learning is transparent, as their deep context AI learns from many data points and adapts its behavior over long periods of time. Caspar's connection to distributed systems may be less evident but is no less important. Using the network of the IoT, the household appliances collect data from the residents which is not sent to a centralized service but is instead stored on-site using edge computing. This type of layered distributed system preserves privacy and increases cost efficiency.
Partners
Caspar has partnered with industry leaders The Wolff Company to bring smart home technology to all three Revel Community locations in Nevada, consisting of over 400 individual residences. Another one of their major partners is Greystar Real Estate, the largest property management company in the country. These companies are intrigued by the technology behind Caspar and have faith in the team developing it, and they will profit from collaborating with this company at an early stage in this growing industry.
Looking ahead
Our team at Linden3 Ventures truly believes Caspar.AI is the right solution for improving assisted living conditions in today's world altered by the pandemic, as well as moving forward.
The smart home industry is growing, making AI expansion into the senior living industry a very lucrative opportunity we are taking. The industry was valued at $80 billion in 2020 but is expected to inflate to $313 billion by 2026. As time passes and technology evolves, many care providers are seeing the value of buying high-quality tech to increase the quality of their customers' lives. This, as well as dropping prices for IoT products like sensors and processors, is causing the demand for tech use in senior living to increase drastically. Adding onto this, the ratio between elders to young people is increasing as people live longer. It is time to give back to those who cared for us all their lives, and investing in Caspar, the future of AI for assisted living, is paramount.