Embedded - 17: Facebook Status: Maybe Not Dead

Episode Date: September 4, 2013

Elecia White spoke with Elizabeth Brenner about devices that can be used to help families worry less about grandparents who live alone (and 87-year-old neighbor friends named Dolores).  Life Alert is the big name in senior push-button call systems. Life Call are the "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" people. (See the commercial!) Life Call and Lileline have accelerometers to detect falls. Twilio allows programs to send and receive phone calls and text messages using its web service APIs.  If This Then That (ifttt.com) connects channels to allow an event to trigger other events (i.e. "failed to twitter today" -> text family) . Fibit API for connecting Fitbit data to other applications. We didn't talk about this but it is a similar idea: Goodnight lamp.

Welcome to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. This is Elysia White, and I'm pleased to have Elizabeth Brenner here to brainstorm some technical solutions for an interesting problem. Hello, Elizabeth. Thank you for joining me. Hi, Elysia. Happy to be here. Last week, while we probably should have been working, you and I were chatting over IM. And I asked you about your day off, hoping you'd say it was refreshing, and that wasn't the case. What happened? Well, an elderly friend started the day by going to the emergency room. And so, she's a neighbor. We heard the wonderful sound of oh, my, I think that fire engine turned onto our street.

And she'd been doing the thing where she knew something was wrong, but she didn't really want to deal with it. And that morning she'd finally reached the point where she couldn't cope with the pain. And so she'd pushed her magic button and called 911 and alerted the troops. And her daughters are a couple hours away. So her poor daughters were going through the situation of knowing there was something wrong, knowing their mother was too stubborn to get to the doctor, and probably having gotten no sleep and then getting waked up first thing in the morning with the news that she was headed to the emergency room. The bottom line, fortunately, was that it was nothing immediately life-threatening,

but the stress involved in everybody and the fact that she's now 87 and her daughters really would like her not to live alone anymore, but there's really nobody who can check in on her every day, made it a really long, stressful day for everybody. In addition to the medical issues, there are all the psychological issues. And your neighbor's name is Dolores, right? Yeah. And so she does have the life alert. You said the magic button. Maybe it's not that brand, but that's the help me, I've fallen and can't get up people. And you push the button and it calls, really it calls their office and then they call 911.

Right. And it's a great system. They call 911. They call her. Right. And it's a great system. They call 911, they call her emergency contacts, everybody is informed, but it's a backup emergency plan. It doesn't give her the assurance that before it's an emergency, somebody will check in that she can just talk to. It doesn't give her the assurance that before it's an emergency, somebody will check in that she can just talk to. It doesn't give her daughters the assurance that she's okay. It just gives them the assurance that when she wants to call for help, she can, which is great.

But there's a lot that it doesn't cover. Well, it is great. I mean, I know we're going to end up dissing on them a little bit, but one thing that should be noted is that if you have a parent who lives alone, wondering if they've fallen is terrifying, and knowing that she could call, well, that's really great. Right. And Dolores has been willing to wear this, the button, and she's really good about it. She puts it on first thing in the morning. She wears it all day.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, found it terribly intrusive. And although her kids got her one, she wouldn't wear it except very occasionally when somebody had given her a strict talking to about wearing it during a particular period. It's offensive to independence. I like to believe that I am a fully functional adult and I can wander around and I can take care of myself. And that's already proven not to be true. And I'm not 87 yet. I'm very glad for my cell phone and all of the things that I can use. But when I'm in pain, technology is not really the thing I want to play with. I don't need a life alert yet, but I could see wanting one, but I could also see how it would be someone telling me I'm not a functional adult anymore.

Absolutely. I'm par somehow. Absolutely. And as far as I can tell, Dolores and her daughter ended up having a frank exchange of views that afternoon. Frank exchange. I bet that's similar to all out shouting. I think it probably was. When I checked in on her in the evening, her daughter had left rather earlier than I would

have expected. Having gotten up early in the morning, gone into work to do payroll, driven two hours down to get her mother out of emergency, took her mother home. The people at the hospital had said, you know, we'd really like you to have a caregiver for a few days. You know, you're still going to be in pain tomorrow. You're still going to be in pain the next day. You're going to have to deal with this with your primary care doctor. It'll take a while. She doesn't want somebody. Her daughter tried to talk her into getting somebody. Her daughter tried to talk her into coming home to Sacramento with her.

And I can imagine that her daughter's point of view is, if you're not going to let me help, why did I even drive down here? I didn't get any sleep last night worrying about you. I drove two hours. Now I'm going to drive two hours home through traffic. What was the point? Well, I mean, there are two sides to that story. Definitely. There is the, there is the worrier and then there's the person who, who wants to be independent. Oh, and I can totally see myself in Dolores's shoes in a few years. I'm 60 now, and I can easily see that by the time I'm 85, I'm making my children crazy because it would really be kind of nice if I was in an independent living situation where there was somebody who would notice if I didn't wake up in the morning or if I didn't come to lunch.

But I can't, I can see myself refusing to do that. Well, I do sometimes when we go by Santana Row, the really frou-frou mall in San Jose, notice they have an independent living hotel, and I think, wow, I could just walk to Santana Row, but I don't think I quite qualify. And those aren't for everybody, because it's still a form of losing your personhood. Well, and it's also for people who like to live in a group living situation. A dorm. I have an aunt who, having watched her mother make a different decision, chose to move into a three-level care facility when she was 75. She decided when she was about

my age that when she was 75, it would be time to move. She wanted to move before she had to move. She wanted to be there for several years before she needed to take advantage of the facilities. She wanted the social background of having people to play bridge with and eat with. And it worked out wonderfully for her. But my mom would never have agreed to that. I mean, it would have meant giving up her dogs and the house that she stayed in all her life. Right. And my ideal of where I'd want to live if I'm alone is a cabin in the woods where I'd see people a couple times a week. The introverts versus the extroverts.

Yeah. I understand the value of living in a group situation when you're older, but I can't see myself being happy there. Okay. So this has all been super depressing. Let's get on to the technology. Delores had the Life Alert, which is cool. And that costs between $30 and $50 per month. There are a number of vendors, Lifeline, Alert One. But the $30 to $50 a month is actually really expensive. It was way more than my mom was willing to pay,

even if she would have been willing to wear it. And I didn't know things were bad enough she needed it because she was 65-ish. It seems like the cost of a cell phone, although you just mentioned you have a pay-as-you-go phone that's only $7 a month. But I bet you don't carry that in the bathroom and all of the other places you go around in your house. Absolutely not. And Dolores has a cell phone, but she doesn't carry it the way my daughter carries hers. How big is the life alert bracelet thing? I haven't seen Dolores's, but remembering my mother-in-law's, I think it was about a disc about an inch and a half in diameter.

So silver dollar size? Yeah. Okay. And it's, I mean, it's like a quarter of an inch thick. It's not really very big. Well, the one she had, I would say, was more than a quarter of an inch thick, but it's been a few years, so I don't know how it's changed. And it needs to be charged. Mm-hmm. Which I find a little terrifying because I would forget to charge it until I needed it, and then, wow, are you screwed.

Yeah, and you have to wear it around your neck, and some people are very comfortable with things around their neck. Some of us really dislike it. And if you take it off to leave your house, then you have to remember to put it back on. And I would because they're not cute. This is not jewelry. No, it's not. And it one of the things that I really never appreciated is how much social engineering matters. How much being able to gamify things and make them cute and make them appealing matters. And is that related to your fairly new job? Yeah, it is.

As you know, I work at Fitbit and their little pedometers are very nicely designed to be friendly. It wants, yeah, they want to make you walk. And it's not Fitbit wants to make you walk. It's like the pedometer wants to make you walk. I remember being at a conference and someone was kind of hovering around the edges, taking a step every few minutes, but not pacing. And I was doing the same because I hate the stupid conference chairs. And, and we kind of met up at one point and she said, well, you know, I have to feed my Fitbit. I thought that was the cutest idea. It's like a Tamagotchi

for exercise. Yeah. But these, these life alert things are not cute. No, they're very functional and they're a wonderful idea, but they're not engineered to be appealing. And they don't, I don't understand why they don't all have accelerometers in them. You know, if you fall, it's easy enough to detect, especially if the fall profile is more G's than you should followed by no movement. And yet only one of them offered that, and that was like 50 bucks a month, which I'm like, it's a 30-cent accelerometer. Why would you charge an extra 20 bucks a month for that?

Yeah. And with Dolores, you said that there was another problem that went beyond the life alert. She's afraid that she won't call. She is. It's, you know, one of the things that has been interesting to me watching my parents age and pass away, watching my in-laws age, is how very different we all are in what we care about, what we worry about, what we're willing to do, what we aren't willing to do. And Dolores, who is, of course, as most of us, hoping that she'll just go to sleep and not wake up one morning, which is, after all, the most pleasant way to go,

she's worried that nobody will notice for a few days and that it will be icky. And these are the things we worry about. It's totally the things we worry about. So that was actually where we got to, and I mentioned to you over IM, I can fix that. Because I've been experimenting with craft electronics, the making things that fit small problems for people, and trying to worry less about productizing,

because I think I get so into make a new business plan, it'll be cool. And, and forget that the technology itself can be fun. Well, and you said, you know, how badly does she want this? Is she willing to pay $80? My reaction was, I'll pay the $80. You know, if you've got something that she can check in with a couple times a day that will let me know, let her daughters know that she's okay, that would be fantastic. So I have been working on this cute little gadget that would let somebody know if I was thinking of them.

I go to a website, I get a color assigned based on my name, and then hit hug or wink or smooch or whatever little button says today. And it sends a message to Electric Imp, which lights a tricolor LED with my color. It's cute. I mean, it's so twee and charmingly cute for what is essentially an internet-enabled LED. I'm kind of done with it.

It's sitting here on my desk. It looks like a jar full of ice. I just have to hot glue it all back together. Ice? Oh, here. Why ice? I'll show you, actually. I'll show you.

It won't do the people at home much good. So I just sent myself a hug. Oh, very cool. And the ice is actually glass that is not totally transparent. It's, I don't know what it's called. The opaque-ish glass. Translucent. Translucent glass. And that diffuses the color so that you can see what color it is.

See, if I re-log in and say, as Elysia, I get a nice cute kind of purple-teal, purplish color. But if I change it so that I'm Elizabeth and send a fuzzy, I get a yellowish-pink color, which is kind of cute too. Anyway, so I've been playing with this as a way of telling someone I'm thinking of you and all of those times when you're out of the room and you wonder if anybody ever cares about you. This was my answer to that.

And it had a little bit to do with I had an electric imp on my desk because Matt brought me one for my podcast. An electric imp is the little Wi-Fi processor that comes in an SD card, and it connects up to the Wi-Fi in a weirdly easy manner. And there's a cloud component, so I don't have to run a server. It talks to their servers. It's cute and small, and most of what's in that jar is the battery. So I made that, and you mentioned Delores,

and I immediately thought of adding to it. I could add an Are You There feature. So in addition to I'm thinking of adding to it. I could add an, are you there feature. So in addition to I'm thinking of you, it's, are you there? I'd give it to you and I could light the light and you would know that I was thinking of you. And if you tapped the widget, it would send me an email or a text. And with Dolores, I thought, well, if you didn't tap the little jar every hour or every three hours during daylight, it would send me a text. Um, and you would, you would know if someone wasn't tapping the jar and tapping the jar, boy, that's going to become a new euphemism for something.

Um, you, I would make it into a little stuffed animal. You know? And every day you'd have to pet it. Yeah. And I can see a wide variety of packaging for different people. Yeah. Yeah. Because it depends on who you are and what you want.

And a college kid would want something different than a grandmother who was given this by her grandchildren. It represents our connection. It's a conduit between us instead of an arduous, annoying deficiency in your independence. Yeah, and I can imagine it being much easier for somebody to wake up and pet their granddaughter Sarah's bear and go have breakfast in the kitchen and pet Sam's bear than to just have a button that, okay, now every time you come in the room, hit the button. I wouldn't do that. Yeah, and that goes back to the gamification in the social engineering. You need to make it attractive.

Well, more than attractive, you need to make it adorable. And I can see Dolores accepting that. Because it's not invasive. Or it is invasive, it's non-invasive. Yes. Or it is invasive. It just isn't obviously invasive. Well, yeah.

It has that friendly, attractive thing to it where it's instead of something you have to do, it becomes something you want to do. I hope. That's what I would want. And I'm very into the, I hope. That's what I would want. And I'm very into the, it would send me a text if you didn't pad it.

Well, and I worry about failure modes. A negative response isn't really good enough because, okay, it's supposed to send me a text if you didn't pad it. But the fact that it didn't send me a text doesn't reassure me that you actually did pad it. You need both ways and you need good fail safes. So I started out with the idea that it would send me an email every time you tapped it, which is great, except... Probably too much. Well, maybe too much. And I don't, given a busy email box, I don't know that I would notice a lack of email.

For me, noticing something didn't happen is just, you know, I don't constantly have stuff going on. I'm easily distracted. You really have to hit me over the head to get me to say, oh, I need to think about that. So I think we need both ways. I think we need a form of communication, which we're going to call a channel because I have learned that is the correct terminology for my web surfing about this. We need a channel that indicates negative information, which is you didn't do something in a given amount of time, and another channel which indicates positive information. And you would go and either you would get an email that said, yes, they patted, or you would be able to go to a website and check when did they pad.

Depending on what you wanted, you would be able to say, because you're right, did it work? Is it on? Does it care? Is a good question. You need to make sure it's working. Absolutely. And I think if you had something like that, the number of different kinds of users and the number of different kinds of options would expand very quickly. So I thought about users. I mean, basically, we're checking for proof of life. Or as you so amusingly put it. Is my mom dead? See, it's my mom dead option. But it would work for college students who are too busy to call. Absolutely. You know, they come in, they patted a little bear that represents their parents, and now they can go about their busy lives. Right. And if they feel

like kicking the bear, it's okay. It's still positive proof of life. And then Dolores, if she did this, she would, she herself would rest assured that if, if a day came when she couldn't get out of bed, whether or not she was alive, she just couldn't get out of bed. Someone would know by 10 AM. Yeah. And, and, uh, I even thought more a high schooler proving that they're in bed by 2am. You know, the little pat that if they don't manage to pat by 2am before they get into bed, it texts their parents and their parents wake up and say, Oh, where's my kid? Yeah. So, so, so different users, I can totally see different users. What features do we need?

What features do we need? Well, I think we need to have them around the house. You need some sort of wireless connection that allows information to go out on the Internet. You need something that lasts a very long time without charging. And I like the idea of having it plugged into the wall. Yeah, that helps the charging bit. It helps the charging bit and also wireless things get carried around and lost. So I think there's, there's value to things you can carry, but there's also value to

things that are in a predictable spot and keeping something plugged into the wall finesses that issue. It would have to have battery backup because you lose power and you still want it. Yeah. So, so wireless. Okay. Yeah. So wireless. Okay, I had Ethernet as one of my possibilities, but wireless doesn't help with that. Cell modem is definitely an option. That means they can carry it everywhere, but it takes more batteries,

which means it needs more charging. Wi-Fi is an option. Electric imp provides a great way to get started with that. It's funny, I actually wrote a review of Electric Imp for my blog and then I didn't post it because it wasn't entirely positive. They certainly are going to grow up some more before it's ready for primetime. But right now, as a hack and a developer system, it's adorable. I don't know that I'd build a product on it, but I certainly would build more of these craft

electronics. So Wi-Fi is definitely an option. And Bluetooth low energy, I think is the other one. We talked about Bluetooth low energy. I'm worried about whether it has the range that we'd need. The Fitbits work beautifully with low energy, but they work for a customer base that is very computer-centric, and they make the assumption that you're going to be near your cell phone or your computer regularly during the day. Somebody like Dolores is not she has a computer but it's exactly the day when she's not going into that room that I want to know is she dead or is she patting it in the kitchen but she hasn't been into the office yet.

Yeah, and the Fitbit Bluetooth low energy widgets all go into the computer or they use your cell phone and that means your computer has to be on. Yeah, and I think that's something that really segments a user base. I think there are people who do have always-on computers and people who don't, and neither of them is going to change their habit patterns to support this. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's a bit, there's a big, I mean, people are like, you leave your computer on all the time.

What if the house burns down? If the house burns down, Apple will be paying me a whole lot of money. It'll be great. But that's's not that's maybe not the way most people think um so okay do wi-fi actually i guess is our winner uh maybe sell modem for version two if we want to have the ubiquitous carry it all the time bracelet so sick of bracelets and smart watches but we're not going to talk about that um and i wanted to i mean since you do work for fitbit i thought another way to do this would be to give them a fitbit or one of its friends and then have it text someone if they don't take 100 steps by 10 a.m. And that sounds, if we could solve the connectivity issues that might happen with that, that sounds like kind of a nice approach for a lot of people.

Because some people retire and they actually do want to start making sure they get enough movement. Yeah. And it would have to be the zip because the zip lasts a long time on a battery. That's the one that's not rechargeable. It's coin cell. Right. Right. I think something that has to be recharged and that takes a significant length of time to be recharged, even if it's only once every two or three weeks, is a non-starter for this purpose. You go to bed and you plug it in to be recharged,

and now you're not connected to it. And now you have a chance that tomorrow you'll forget to pick it up, or you'll forget to charge it. And something that only works for the first two weeks is probably not a good choice. And, and I don't know if you're speaking from your experience, but it's as though you're speaking from my experience. I use my Fitbit until I need to recharge it. And then I go for three or four days and then I remember to put my Fitbit back on. And so, yeah, I, I see what you're going with there. I think except for the base station, we could probably make this, it's about putting together Lego blocks with the Fitbit API. It's not a month's worth of work writing original software, more like a day or two

putting it together. But that Bluetooth low energy base station is kind of hard. Maybe we should talk to the Fitbit people about fixing that. That'd be cool. What are their non-invasive checks? Does Delores send an email every day? She absolutely does not. She uses email, but she wouldn't send an email every day. She, I, I mean, I'm impressed by any 87 year old that uses computers fairly comfortably. Um, my mother-in-law absolutely

would not. You know, her, her kids kept trying to get her a computer that lived in the corner. Come on, mom, it's not that hard. You know, we know that even very nicely designed computers need occasional petting and care and the internet goes down and you don't know whether it's your router or whether it's the server or you know you uh like in the case of my mother-in-law she let her grandchildren download tons of games and play games on the computer come with those games surprisingly after a while the computer was kind of corrupt i just can't imagine how that happened, so are there other things that could work into her daily life? Um, I mean, you said she doesn't have a smartphone, but could she have an iPhone app? And if she just picked it up every day, it would automatically. If, if she had an iPhone, I think then everything opens up because I think you could, if, if she was comfortable with an iPhone in the first place,

we could set an iPhone up to send a text a couple times a day based on her having picked it up. You've got the accelerometer. You've got a lot of pieces there where you could write your Is My Mother Dead app to run on the iphone um and you've got the charging problem oh uh but it's every night which at least is a habit pattern but dolores in particular i don't see accepting a smartphone. It's just, I mean, she's a fairly technical person for her age.

She was an accountant in her working life. But even she is willing to accept limited new things into her life and somebody like my mother-in-law who was not a sciencey person not a mathy person not a technical person there there was no chance she'd do that but i can see it working really well for some other user bases i can see it working really well for the college student or the person with a chronic disease like diabetes where they're all right 99.9% of the time, but it's always possible to pass out from low sugar and that would be bad. And then what about things that monitor the house? We have a nest thermometer or a nest temperature.

I don't even know what it's called. Thermistor. And it notices when we walk by and it lights itself up. And yes, we have this because we have all of the gadgets. It's just the way we live. This is the show for people who love gadgets. Anyway, we have the nest and it lights up when we walk by because it notices. Would Dolores like to be able to not pet a bear or do anything else? Just have it,

you know, put an accelerometer under her pillow and have it automatically send a message that, yes, she's out of bed. Yes, she's moving around. So that's a really interesting option and not one I'd thought about. I can't answer the question, but I certainly think that there are people in the target population that would be happier with one thing than another. And the target population is huge. Yeah. I mean, even if we just talk about, quote, the elderly or baby boomers, because that's the phrase. Baby boomers cover everybody from the people who are taking care of the moms and dads who need help to being the moms and dads who need help. So yeah, the spectrum is huge and we're not going to come up with a single solution.

And to a degree, we're talking about anybody who lives alone. Yes. Yes, there was the 30 Rock where Liz was worried that she was going to choke to death so she had all of these plans on what to do when she refused to eat for a week. It was hilarious. Anyway. Okay, so we have the padding. I like that because I think it's cute um we have the fit bit if we could solve the base station problem which i think is fairly easily solved um and we have the what is essentially an intruder alarm except used in a friend it's opposite and

and thinking about it my, that's probably the thing that my father would have accepted. My father lived alone from, you know, the time my mom passed away until the time he passed away. And he was very unwilling to take action to make sure people knew he was okay. But he absolutely expected me to make sure he was okay. And he finally got an answering machine because I pitched a fit and explained to him that he didn't like to answer the phone. And so I'd call him that he wouldn't answer the phone. And if that went on for two or three days, I'd have to come over and make sure he wasn't dead in the backyard. And at that point, he finally accepted

that having an answering machine and actually returning my call would at least save me the drive. I can see him being willing to have something in the house that noticed that he walked by and being unwilling to do anything active, like petting a bear. Okay. I don't, I mean, the next thing I have for ideas for what we should build for people is maybe a little more grandiose, and that's the robotic service dog. That's pretty grandiose. Does it bark to wake you up? I guess it would have to.

Well, you know, and they have beagles that check your insulin levels. So let's just shove a little mass spectrometer into the mouth of our robotic service dog. Should all be easy. We could just build this this weekend. It's a long weekend after all. It is, sure. And I'm sure you have all sorts of pieces here that we could put together. And you could program it with different routines on different days so that on Monday, if you're not awake by 6.30, it would start barking. But on Saturday, you get to sleep till 10. And then it electrocutes you.

Well, that's a feature. And we haven't really talked about the other half of the technology, which is I have a gadget and it connects to Wi-Fi, which is all, I mean, we're kind of hand-waving our way around that because connecting to Wi-Fi is not always easy. But we're going to have to hand-wave our way through that because there is no good method, sadly, yet. There are ways of getting texts and things. I asked about sending email because I discovered as part of this conversation, If This Then That, in which if something happens on one of their channels, which could be Twitter or RSS or Instagram or email, then do that, which would be send me a

text, Twitter it, put it on Facebook. And so you get an event, and it creates another event. Okay, so what I want is I want a Facebook page, and I want my status every day to be not dead. Based on an accelerometer built into your mattress? And then, you know, if it doesn't move, you'll switch the status to maybe not dead. Yeah, I think that works um so twilio is probably the big one that does uh mobile things so that's that's we say you just send a text no actually you connect to the twilio app and the twilio app sends a text for you and it's it's not know, it's not quite as push button as I'd want it to be. It's kind of like the Wi-Fi is not as easy to connect devices

to your home Wi-Fi as I want it to be. Sending an email or making a phone call, you can make generated phone calls, you can pre-record a message. For example, if we did give one of these to Dolores before it texted her daughter or called her daughter, I would actually want it to call her and say, Dolores, are you okay? Could you please come pat my bear? That's another euphemism that really didn't, wow, pat my bear. Maybe we're going to make that the title. Between that and is my mother dead? We're doing well here. Yeah. Now you promised that the title. Between that and Is My Mother Dead, we're doing well here. Yeah. Now you promised that this is not something that's going to come back to us. Because one of my daughters pointed out that should you go ahead with this idea and market it and should it become

successful, that some journalist is going to go dig in the archives and come up with, you know, oh my God, did you hear what they were saying? Oh, if they need to find all of the stupid things I've said in my life, there'll be no problem. This barely scratches the surface. Uh, yeah. But so what else? I mean, I think you should contact the person before you contact their family. And I think that's what most of the lifeline things do. Okay. Um, so it's certainly a proven approach and it makes sense to me sure okay and and then we talked a little bit early about fail safes if if we made this and it went to the electric imp and we did wi-fi and if you didn't contact me within three hours you didn't pat your bear in three hours, or you didn't pat your bear in three hours, it would text me, let's say.

We'll go back to that original plan. And I think we would have to have it be that if electric imp was down, it would text you with a different message that said, I don't know, call for yourself or if the electric imp server noticed that the bear was uncharged i want to say the bear was down it's like the bear is down oh my god call the police but if the bear was not functional um then it would have to send a different text that said i can't tell you anything's wrong, I can't tell you anything's wrong, but I can't tell you anything's right.

And I think I wouldn't want to do medical this way. No. It's too scary to. Way too scary. But even this is a little scary. It'd be great to hear all of the success stories. Like at ShotSpotter, when I worked there with Gunshot Location,

it was great to hear, wow, we saved the pregnant lady because the police would never have gotten there in time. And it was horrible. She was bleeding, but we saved her. That was awesome. But it's another one of like ShotSpotter with this. If you fail, boy, that's probably why Life Alert costs so much because they have to have multiple

fail-saves. Oh, well, and maybe they have to have liability insurance. I don't know. But I would hope we wouldn't with this because it would be a, we would not be selling it to the elderly because that's not high profit. We would be selling it to the children of the elderly as something cute and not as a failure thing, but as a backup.

Yeah. And I think having all the fail-safes is great and that's something that you'd want to build on, but I'd hate to wait to supply it to anybody until you've got all the fail-safes. It's an amelioration. It doesn't have to be a complete solution. It makes things better.

And that's what technology is supposed to do, although it is a little scary. Yeah, you start depending on things things and then they don't work. I mean, I can imagine in ShotSpotter that the downside was to get the call that said, we got the location wrong and the police stormed into the wrong house and things got very bad. We never had stormed into the wrong house, but I have to admit I've had some police chiefs yell at me and all I could do was say, I'm sorry, sir.

That's always a good fallback. We used to say that to the people that ran the paper machines. I'm in the office and the plant manager is yelling at me, I need help. It's like, so sorry sorry they're there yeah yeah at some point you just acknowledge you have some culpability and and promise it will be better in the future which is one reason to get started on this is it does make a promise that in the future it will be better so what do you want for dolores having heard all the options? I think the robotic service dog may be V2.

Well, her house is immaculate. She really doesn't want a dog of any kind, even robotic. For this particular person, I like the idea of something she would pat. I like the idea of having it several places in the house um it's okay to have you or her daughter set it up i don't have to write instructions for how she has to set it up oh absolutely and i think that's part of how lifeline works is that they have a large they actually have a large group of volunteers that install some of the devices. If somebody made Lifeline, if any of you listening make a Lifeline clone and you're giving it out to the elderly for $30 a year, let me know. I want to

help. Yeah. Volunteers, I could see volunteering for for that although it's so expensive but it is but you know the installation is a big deal yeah and i think your insight that the your marketing to not to the elderly but to their children is is very good. So she's getting a bear. Should it have an LED that you or someone else can hit a URL and it will light up and she'll just notice that it's cute? Or is that just confusing? I think she'd like that. Okay, so there's the thinking of you functionality,

and there's a pat, and her daughter needs to get a message i guess we have to ask her daughter whether text email or phone call is the best but one of those and that message happens if the service is down the bear is not charged or um or she doesn't check in. Yeah. And she, it should be chargeable with a fairly large battery, say a week's worth of charge. And yet it should be plugged in most of the time. So it's probably a USB wall wart sort of thing. Sounds right.

Okay. And I guess it should blink or do something when its batteries are low. It's hard to have things blink when your batteries are low. Cause it's just like, I'm killing my batteries so saying, I need your help. There's something beeping in the house and I can't find it. She had at least five smoke alarms, which is great. Oh, you're supposed to have them in every room and in all the hallways. Yeah, and she did

but but something had started beeping and she she recognized it as a low battery alert and she couldn't find the thing that was beeping so she decided to take all her smoke alarms down which is not unreasonable on the face of it until you realize that you have a slightly frail 85 year old woman climbing ladders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she got them all down and she took them into the garage and shut the doors so that she wouldn't be distracted if they were still beeping. Please make the beeping stop. And the beeping didn't stop because it was the CO2 alarm, which was down low in the hallway and she'd forgotten it existed. So all of that leads me to be really unsure

what sort of low battery warning is appropriate. We should send her email three days before the battery starts to get low. I think that that's a good choice because she does check her email. She uses it to keep in touch with her grandchildren to get pictures. Three days sounds about right. Even a week. About one third of the battery life. Yeah. Yeah. I had the battery life at a week. Well, you know, about one third of the battery life. Yeah. Yeah, I had the battery life at a week was my plan. And I guess then at day, at battery dead minus three,

we send her email at minus two, we start sending email to her family. Yeah. All right. This, I mean, these are all, these are all happily very much Lego blocks. It's not going to be cheap. I told you,

I think 80 bucks because that's, that's the wifi system, the battery, um, finding a cute receptacle. I mean, I like my little jar here, but it's kind of ridiculous.

I will make something cute. Um, I, it isn't really, I mean, the accelerometers are cheap. There are ones that are sub-dollar. I think I don't have any of those on stock, but eh, either I'll buy one or we'll get one of

my $5 ones that are here. Does that sound like a plan? Sounds good. What? So, for Dolores, the maintenance cost of having things working on a website is not high. I mean, one of us can piggyback that on something we've already paid for, but how do you price that support? Because if it were something that you really had for a significant population,

it's starting to cost money to maintain the infrastructure. And the infrastructure has to be beyond what, say, Fitbit has, because even though they work with consumers, they work with tech-savvy consumers, and this would not be tech-savvy. Mm-hmm. they work with tech-savvy consumers, and this would not be tech-savvy. Well, the $80 is all off-the-shelf retail parts. I mean, there's no quantity discounts there,

which means that that's actually a reasonable facsimile that if I built it in quantity and... Well, that's not true if I did if I did a wi-fi chip and did my own cloud server which at this point if we were making a million of them say um we could probably get the hardware down to sub five dollars say sub 10 just because I'm too lazy to work that hard um and then multiply by four to be able to sell it into Target and make a little itty-bitty tiny profit by the time you have packaging and construction and all of that. So that's $40.

And then you would need a significant... I don't want a monthly fee. I'm really kind of opposed to monthly fees. So I guess, I guess you would add another 10 or $20 on top of that for the service. And it would be a year's worth of service. But I personally would never really expire someone unless they were super annoying. And only after like two or three years. So I guess $60 is where I'd end up, and you would need a decent service organization. But you would still be marketing towards the minimally consumer tech savvy

and not the more elderly anti-tech savvy. Does that make sense? It does. And there's got to be a way to leverage some of the community support for people who actually can't afford it. Like the Tom's shoes where you buy one pair of shoes and they give another one away for free. Yeah. I guess if I was doing this and given how I feel about this, which is pretty strongly given what happened with my mom, um, I would want to never turn a profit, not necessarily make it a nonprofit where I accept donations. But if you ended up with a

profit at the end of the year you give away you give it away I I think that there are companies that are like that and they're good companies that are like that they make me happier and that's I guess I don't need to make a profit from this is that just so Pollyanna it makes you want to throw up well it doesn't make me want to throw up. Um, I think, I think you at over time, you have to start thinking about what a small profit is and whether you need some pad to go into the next year. Yes. Well, Amazon doesn't make profit because they reinvest. They determined, they're very, very determined, very determined, very set on not making a profit. And so you would have to invest in R&D. It's not like you wouldn't want to change or you wouldn't want to pay your engineers or you'd want to make all of this vaporware for free.

I'm just thinking, to hell with the stock market. To hell with... Oh, I like the idea of having a small company that doesn't intend to grow particularly large. Not just for this idea, but sort of my ideal of what I would want a company to be if I were a principal in that company. I wouldn't want a company that was going to grow and make everybody rich. I want to work with people that I really enjoy working with, making enough money to be comfortable, but having the control that you get by keeping a company small and

keeping a company private and not being greedy about how much money you're trying to bring in would be much more fun. Yeah. And I may be done waiting for my Silicon Valley lottery ticket and ready to start a company that's being in love with what you're doing and doing it every day. I think my producer is sending me a message that says, no, get back to work. No, he's sending me a message that says, new title for the show.

I guess we're not going with My Mom is Dead or whatever else we've said. Pet to the bear. The new title may be my wife is a communist. Thank you so much. Well, now that we're getting messages from the producer, I guess that means we need to wrap it up. I'm not sure if we've mentally built an empire

or just managed to add one more thing to my to-do list. Probably both. Is there anything else you'd like to add? No, I'm about run down. I had a really good time with you. Thank you for inviting me. Well, I do care about this a lot. So I'm glad that our IM chat turned into talking some more. Thank you for coming on the show and giving me something to think about. You got it. And if you listening want to contact me or Elizabeth, email the show, show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. My producer and husband is Christopher

White, making us sound good once again. If you want to help with the show, please write a review in iTunes or Stitcher. Short would be fine, but we just need a high star rating or two. And I will leave you with this thought. If you care about something, set it free. If it doesn't come back, rebuild it from that leftover parts.