When senior citizens are the early adopters of contact tracing tech - The Verge

Steve Kasch’s mom, Julia, was always worried about losing her keys. “She wasn’t even driving, but she was checking her purse every ten minutes,” he says.

Kasch told me that his mom was fairly independent, but over the past few years, her memory started to go. She would forget if she ate a meal or, more troubling, forget if she took medication. “She might think she took her pill, and not take it for three days,” he says. “Or she might take six in one day.”

In December, Kasch and his wife realized she couldn’t keep living on her own, and they started shopping around for an assisted living facility. The Legacy at Town Square in Amarillo, Texas, stood out. It gave each resident a location-monitoring, emergency button-equipped wristband — which also swiped them into their rooms. “Now, there’s no keys,” Kasch says.

Just after she moved in, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down access to senior care facilities, many of which have been flattened by the virus. The wristbands, already a draw for family members like Kasch, became even more of a selling point. They’re made by a company called CarePredict. CarePredict normally markets its devices to caregivers as tools that track changes in older adults’ behavior. They monitor things like activity level and walking patterns. But when the COVID-19 pandemic started devastating nursing homes, the team quickly spun up a new feature: automatic contact tracing.

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