CarePenguin

The elderly population is projected to nearly double by 2050 and 75% of older adults want to age in their own homes. However, their families worry about them living independently. They're worried that they might fall, pass out, or have a stroke, and no one will be there to help. Getting elderly loved ones to wear an emergency pendant is often a struggle and putting cameras or motion sensors in their house is invasive of their privacy. Calling everyday can be time-consuming and socially difficult, and that's only one touchpoint in 24 hours.

CarePenguin gives families with elderly loved ones a little extra peace of mind without being invasive of privacy and requiring zero compliance. CarePenguin simply detects activity in a home through hot water use and displays that activity on the CarePenguin app where family members and caregivers can see the activity and receive alerts if we detect a lack of activity, encouraging them to check in. The average senior citizen uses water seven times a day, making it a great proxy for human behavior. CarePenguin is a fraction of the price of any other remote monitoring solution on the market. We also just partnered with Best Buy and CarePenguin will be available alongside other aging and disability technology products on Best Buy's website.

Our solution serves both adult children and their elderly loved ones. If an adult child can't get a hold of their parent, they can simply check their CarePenguin app to see if they've been using water and going about their daily routine like normal. If there hasn't been any activity, then they know to check in. CarePenguin saves family members from worrying about their elderly loved ones. In addition, CarePenguin has the potential to save lives of older adults. Many times, it's not the impact of the fall that lands independent older adults in a nursing home, it's the long lie times of not being able to get up after a fall. CarePenguin reduces these long lie times by alerting family members if there's a lack of activity when there would normally be activity. One of our customers got a CarePenguin notification one morning that there hadn't been activity at her grandma's house. She called and found out that her Grandma was sick in bed and she was able to send her mom over to care for her. CarePenguin is already impacting the lives of adult children and their aging parents.

We are the perfect team to build this solution because we are ultimately building it for ourselves. I started CarePenguin because I was worried about my own grandparents living alone. I put sensors on their water heaters and anytime I was worried, I could just check to see if they had used water recently. It worked so well for my own family that I decided to make it into a business. Because we use CarePenguin everyday to check on our own loved ones, that inherently gives us an advantage. We know what the customers want and need because we are the customer. We have also interviewed over 150 people as customer validation and frequently check in with our customers on what they like about CarePenguin and what features they'd like to see in the future. We have written several case studies on our customers which can be found on our blog at carepenguin.com 

We want to grow our network of people in the elder care industry. We want to get more involved in the senior care community and be able to get meetings with executives at independent living facilities about possibly using CarePenguin to ensure their residents are okay. We'd also like to dive more into the Medicare Advantage space to see if CarePenguin would be useful to insurance companies. We are looking for connections!