Blog Archives: mHealth

One of the really fun things about being in this industry is the sheer level of innovation that is occurring. It seems like every week a new company pops up providing some sort of remote monitoring for the elderly. “We use an AI-powered platform attached to activity monitoring sensors to tell you if Mom is OK” or “Our remote monitoring capability uses Alexa and other cutting edge technologies to give you piece of mind” could be the marketing tagline for a lot of them. But when it comes to using remote monitoring for medical conditions, a fundamental question needs to be asked: Does it work? I’ll cut to the chase: sometimes it does, other times it's not so clearcut...

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What’s the matter with Alexa?  When it comes to the age-in-place elderly, nothing that a resetting of expectations can’t fix. To be clear, we like Alexa.  In fact, our next release of our firmware will include Alexa integration.  However, it seems like every week we will run into someone who says “Isn’t Alexa going to do everything that ONKÖL does?”  Ummm…...

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Does it require professional installation? No. All you need to do is plug it into an electrical outlet. Some third-party sensors like smoke detectors might require non-professional assistance (family member or friend) to place on the wall or ceiling. Does my loved one need to configure it in any way? The unit is configured remotely by either a family member or caregiver. How do peripherals get paired with the ONKÖL unit? Peripherals are paired from the user website. All you need to do is press the appropriate pairing button on the peripheral device when prompted by the ONKÖL unit...

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From the start, ONKÖL has been designed to be different. On the outside, we specifically designed ONKÖL so that it looked like a high end piece of audio equipment, or about as far from medical as you can get. Although our design sessions were a blast, getting the outside design just right took a lot of long hours with mechanical, electrical, and human interface engineers. But the level of innovation on the outside pales in comparison to what we’ve done on the inside. We’ve spent the last year gathering customer feedback on our first production units, and based upon that, we added new features, deprecated some others and — most importantly — confirmed what intuitively knew to be true: our clients want to own their data...

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ONKÖL is a revolutionary family communications solution that allows older folks and younger family members stay in touch. We've all heard about the Internet of Things: wireless sensors that can monitor and configure everything from thermostats to refrigerators to medical devices. Over the coming years, we will see anywhere from 18 billion to 220 billion new sensors brought to the market, and a lot of them could benefit the elderly. But there's a problem: older folks typically aren't crazy about new technology. At ONKÖL, our goal is to enable the elderly and their families to benefit from the coming Internet of Things tsunami by addressing head-on those hurdles that stop Mom and Dad from using new technology...

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Charlie Peters from Emerson wrote an insightful piece regarding the partnering dilemma that Internet of Things (IoT) businesses face, something he calls the last link paradox. Essentially he says that providers of IoT sensors need to connect to a larger ecosystem, but in the short run that amounts to dancing with the devil: your partner could wipe you out in the long run after you did all of the heavy lifting. I fundamentally agree with his premise as it has a lot of historical precedents, not the least of which is the continued "last mile" problems experienced by wired and wireless carriers for so many years...

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ONKÖL Awards: ...

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