collie

About Collie

Collie is a new approach to home health care for older people living alone or in assisted living. Its physical presence is small—three or four wall-mounted boxes about the size of a bar of soap around the home—but the impact a Collie system can have on a person's quality of life is truly enormous. By tracking a Senior's Walk Signature™, Collie measures key fall-risk indicators, such as gait and sway properties, and provides caregivers a convenient daily Walk Signature Score™. This allows the caregiver to not only be alert to sudden events like a fall but to gain preventive care insight by seeing changes in the Walk Signature Score™ over time.

The big picture

Put broadly, Collie provides older people the freedom to live on their own terms while providing their families, friends, and other caretakers with peace of mind by always being there to look out for trouble.

While it certainly can function as an automated warning should an accident, such as a fall, occur, this functionality is only a last resort for Collie. Its true purpose is to detect developing problems before an accident or major health problem arises and send a warning so that medical intervention can prevent such traumatic experiences altogether.

In practice, a Collie system looks something like this:

In the home of the patient, several wall sensors are installed in important places—the bedroom, living room, and kitchen, for example. These sensors gather data and analyze it all day and all night. They do their job without any assistance from humans. There's no need to check in, because Collie will send a warning the instant it detects a problem on the horizon. When it does, it can get the information where it needs to go immediately and in several different ways. Family caretakers—sons or daughters, siblings, or friends—can receive a warning through an app on their smartphones. Collie can also send warnings directly to healthcare professionals or, in an assisted living situation, to a monitoring center within the facility.

And, of course, even when all is well, Collie's apps can provide a status report at any time with the touch of a button, just for reassurance.

How it works

Put more specifically, the function of Collie is to keep watch over key areas of a house, apartment, or assisted-living room and analyze the movements of the person inside to detect the risk of predictable problems associated with aging. Chief among these is fall risk assessment—breaking a hip or taking a blow to the head can be devastating for older people whose health is already in decline. Collie can also detect a wide range of other issues, however, such as development or worsening of arthritis or even breathing difficulties.

This idea—to use technology to monitor the health and safety of older people living alone—has been the subject of a great deal of study and technological advancement over recent years, but Collie represents a leap forward over the current state of the art, which relies primarily on video cameras.

Why?

Because Collie is exclusively a sonar technology. It uses an acoustic signal to monitor movement with extreme precision, similar to the way a submarine might map the floor of the ocean or a Doppler radar would detect moisture in the sky.

The advantages of the sonar in a Collie system over video are plentiful. Here are a few highlights:

1. Collie is less expensive. Feasibility studies conducted in development of Collie predict that each sonar sensor can be made for far less than the video-based sensors currently on the market.

2. Collie maintains privacy without sacrificing quality of data. The only data Collie uses to do its job is a wave pattern. No images, no video. This leaves patients well protected without the feeling of intrusion that comes from being under video surveillance 24 hours a day.

3. Collie's data is endlessly adaptable. Collie can detect amazingly subtle variations in movement. It can sense a limp in one's step, a sway while standing up that might indicate balance problems, or even a minor difference between the swaying pattern of one arm versus the other while walking. The algorithms Collie uses to detect problems and issue warnings can be continually updated and modified as new ways to use its rich arrays of data are discovered.

The real beauty of Collie is that it uses a new, innovative way to apply an old, reliable technology. Under the hood, it's a complex analysis of a stunningly complete set of information. The view from the outside, however, is simple:
Privacy. Safety. Freedom. Peace of mind.