Yesterday Alertacall announced that Eldercare, the community alarm provider of Help the Aged, is the first strategic partner for its new Pellonia service.

The Ancient Romans were practical people, and the story is that they looked to the goddess Pellonia to help them avert mischief and danger and to drive away their enemies. She was therefore considered appropriate to represent a system designed to enhance telecare services.

So how does today’s Pellonia help? She’s It’s a managed system that enables organisations to:

• Offer their own brand of safety confirmation service (check end-user safety each day)
• Send automated appointment and medication reminders
• Improve mobile worker safety, location and management
• Co-ordinate operator reassurance calls
• Send automated mass telephone messages to clients

Perhaps unlike her Roman counterpart whose origins are rather obscure, the modern Pellonia has a known pedigree: it has developed out of Alertacall’s own need to automate features of its service. It appears that it will be easy to integrate into current services because organisations do not have to install any new software or manage the technology. This is done by the Pellonia team and is accessed securely by the service provider’s staff over the internet.

Owing to Pellonia’s scalability, Eldercare, as an official strategic partner, says it is ready to provide other alarm services with a range of complementary telecare and other monitoring services based on the Pellonia system. Chris Hopkinson, Director of Eldercare, is quoted as saying “Pellonia is an obvious choice for Eldercare. With it we can provide several new services to our clients and manage some of our own processes – for example mobile worker safety – with greater ease and efficiency.”

Read the Pellonia press release and/or visit the website. SeniorLink Eldercare website.

[At last, something genuinely new on the telecare scene! By the way, I think the press release doesn’t do justice to the significance of this development. Is there anything else around that gives traditional alarm providers extensive scope to develop new revenue-generating services – with half of the work done for them - which they can sell to new and existing clients, and which has the potential to generate cost savings at the same time?]

In October a Freedom of Information Act request found that one in four Primary Care Trusts has closed or reduced dementia services in the past three years and less than half have early detection services in place. Read more in HealthcareRepublic.

It’s interesting when two stories come in at the same time, unrelated except that they are tapping into the zeitgeist. Here is an example of this phenomenon. The first item is about the use of mobile phones in telehealth around the world and, if you think it is a bit ‘far out’ still, read the second item – Nokia planning to get into the ’smart home’ arena, including health monitoring.

1. Lives of a cell

2. Nokia develops a smart home platform to offer consumers new ways to control their homes with a mobile device

And, in a slightly difference vein, this story, just in:

Text message surgery saves Congolese boy

Not telecare, but a terminology issue as it refers to the target client group for telecare/telehealth companies. When I read about ‘the elderly’ or worse, the near-meaningless, ‘the vulnerable’, I imagine that the writer is probably hardly out of their twenties or thirties, or still has that mindset. If you want to alienate your potential clients, this is the language to use.

A brief read, with an American perspective, but with interesting survey results. Baby boomers? Older people? Senior citizens? Elders? What would you like to be called in your middle and later years? by Rita R. Robison.

A quick reminder that if you wish to present at next April’s Med-e-Tel conference the deadline for papers is 20th December. Submission details here.

Telecare Aware readers not attending the TSA conference can access press releases and other conference-related information provided by exhibitors by visiting this page. More information may be added over the next few days.

Honeywell and Home Telehealth Limited (HTL) today announce that they have signed a non-exclusive agreement that enables HTL to provide consulting services, support and supplies as an official Honeywell partner to organisations that have purchased, or that intend to purchase, Honeywell telehealth monitoring equipment in the UK.

In a letter to PCTs made available to Telecare Aware, Perter Range, MD of Home Telehealth Ltd says: “The word ‘official’ is important because, although the formal agreement and support is new, Home Telehealth Limited have been operating the Genesis Classic for the last thirty months within our nurse-led clinical care centre…If you therefore have Honeywell HomMed Telehealth technology that is not maximising its investment potential for improved patient care, or fully deployed in patient homes in the community, HTL can assist you and meet with your care teams or commissioners to discuss how we may assist you in delivering a reduction in un-planned hospital admissions, reducing bed utilisation days, facilitating early hospital discharge and delivering the many other substantial benefits to patient care that Telehealth enabled care could be delivering to your organisation.” Read the full letter here.

buddi is a small GPS tracker with round-the-clock emergency support. It enables:

• location of the wearer at any time in response to a button push
• conversation with the wearer
• location of the wearer if thought to be missing
• identification of the wearer leaving a specified area
• wearer tracking

There is also a version for pets.

buddi has been developed and is made in the UK. It has a battery life of more than three days in GPS mode, is easily recharged and is water resistant.

Download factsheet.

Barnsley PCT, one of the first to undertake a substantial pilot trial of the Docobo doc@HOME system (Telecare Aware August 2006) has announced that it is to roll it out to more patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), chronic heart failure (CHF) and various clients receiving palliative care. It will also be undertaking an extensive research trial to examine the benefits in more detail with a view to further expanding the implementation of the system across other clinical areas.

The introduction of the system has received positive feedback from Barnsley’s Community Matron Team which monitors clients with long term conditions. A spokesperson for the team commented: “The introduction of the system has enabled the team to be alerted to patients concerns regarding their condition earlier, which enables us to reprioritise our visits, allowing earlier intervention to prevent the condition from worsening.” Barnsley PCT press release.

“Although the secure transport of patient information is fundamental to telehealth, it is just the sprawling back-end of a technology ecosystem that is only as good as the sensors themselves.” Read the rest of the article Beyond Simple Telehealth to find out more… [Annoying popup advert alert - just close it to read the article]

Well, it is according to this article in the EE Times. Actually it’s a useful canter over the telehealth countryside with an emphasis on what’s ahead. It puts the forthcoming Continua Alliance initial guidelines into context as a significant event. A new telehealth age dawns.

A very apt item hot on the heels of Wednesday’s posting about the telecare ethics paper A Trusted Infrastructure for Telecare (here), which should be a ‘must read’ for everyone involved in telecare and telehealth. This is an interview with a gerontologist, Jacqueline L. DuPont, who has had cameras in the rooms of care homes for people with dementia for the past ten years. Item from Orange County Register.

The downside of having a pendant alarm from a user’s perspective. Phyllis McGuire in the Bennington Banner.

An interesting and insightful story that puts the demographic and workforce pressures on care of older people into the context of the actual experience of remote patient monitoring for both the person at home and the nurse. A good read. Telehealth program serves growing elderly population from Newsday.com.

You should be signed up to receive these yourself (here) as Telecare Aware is not going to report all the bits and pieces it contains. But the item that struck me as most significant was the ‘Vendor Assisted Source Code (VASC) Released’ item near the end which says “Continua recently released its first edition of Vendor Assisted Source Code (VASC) to its membership! VASC is shared software modules that help Continua members design Continua-compliant devices. By offering this free to members, Continua will save its membership hundreds of thousands of dollars in development fees while helping members jumpstart their products for Continua’s certification program.” In other words Continua has, in a single move, put non-members at a distinct disadvantage. Smart.

PS: Nice to see they have taken my advice at last and changed the unreadable grey text on their website to black.