FallCall Solutions, LLC launched a crowd funding campaign on Medstartr.com to turn their “smart” fall detection prototype designed exclusively for Apple Watch® into a fully functional application. The app, FallCall NowTM, was designed following months of collaboration between physicians and developers who wanted to create an innovation that would change how caregivers, loved-ones and emergency services could automatically communicate following fall events.
“Here is a scary fact: 1 in 3 people over age 65 fall each year and more than 27,000 seniors die as a result,” stated Shea Gregg MD, Connecticut Physician and Founder of FallCall Solutions LLC. “As a surgeon who cares for these individuals and their families every day, I hear awful stories about seniors incapacitated for hours on the ground because they were unable to call someone for help. Late presentations to hospitals following significant injuries lead to worse outcomes. This is unacceptable.”
App Screens for Apple Watch (Credit: PR Newswire)
As a prototype application, FallCall Now is able to provide seniors with new ways to call for help when they need it most. “The application sits at the crossroads of trauma care, lab research, and engineering innovation,” states Dr. Gregg. “We began with building a pioneering research app for Apple Watch that allowed us to study falls in realtime. From this research, we have built both manual and automated ways to alert loved-ones and central monitoring agencies of fall events. Additionally, our smart technology has the ability to distinguish between low and high mechanism falls. Not everyone needs the fire department to show up following every fall.”
Initial studies of FallCall Solution’s prototype demonstrate that their provisionally patented technology works and they have pivoted their focus towards looking for support to complete their app. “We chose crowd funding as a means of raising capital to encourage our communities to come together in support of an innovation that can ultimately help our parents, grandparents, and loved-ones. It seems that everyone knows someone who has been affected by a fall. Through this campaign, we can all do something about it.”
The mission of FallCall Solutions is to build simplified telemonitoring solutions for seniors and caregivers on ecosystems that are widely distributed. Their first application, ElderCheck Now®, is already available on the Apple App Store®. “We have the team assembled to build FallCall Now and we look for the support of family members, seniors, healthcare providers and investors to allow us to create something completely new.”
For more information, please go to: http://www.medstartr.com/project/detail/1146
