At Trusterra we continuously survey societal, demographic, economic and technological landscapes for trends and patterns as these trends often act as the starting point for many of our product ideas. We created Trusterra Labs as the formal umbrella group for our active market research and product development initiatives. To date Trusterra Labs has successfully produced Scoop which is already having a tremendous impact on how people communicate.
As we search we sometimes spot a number of trends that coalesce to produce what we like to call a Sea Change in the status quo of a given industry or business. While individual trends can provide fertile conditions for a new product to be successful, Sea Changes – consisting of convergent trends – are substantially more powerful and thus significantly boost the probability of success for related products and services. The underlying trends in a Sea Change do not simply add up but rather amplify each others’ impact exponentially.
In addition to seeking patterns and powerful trends, we look for opportunities where we can support and contribute to the community around us. After all in addition to working and experimenting with cool technologies, the sense of giving back, eliminating burdens and making people’s lives a bit easier is why we get out of bed to do this every morning!
Aging Demographics and the Looming Crisis of Care
One key area of interest that we have studied in the past year is related to elder care. This area is subject to a number of important trends and facts:
- Developed and Developing nations have rapidly aging populations (39M over 65 in 2008 in the U.S.)
- This population has a strong desire to live and ‘age at home’
- By far, the elderly perceive successful aging as aging independently
- Shrinking workforces drive up cost of traditional elder care (Assisted Living Facilities at $35-50,000/year, Nursing Homes at $80,000/year)
- Family caregivers are under increasing stress as they struggle to cope with burden of care for children and parents (so called sandwich generation)
- Supporting family caregivers is financially sound economic policy for governments (intrinsic value of care $350B/year in the U.S.)
We believe these trends necessitate a fundamentally new approach to elder care. A key ingredient of this new approach is that of comprehensive support for family caregivers. Given the massive intrinsic value of care provided by families, it is fundamentally important for governments to devise and put in place programs, tools and training to bolster this primary pillar. Technology can play a pivotal role in supporting families by removing barriers to communication and coordination and by boosting the safety and security of the elderly while allowing them to maintain independence and dignity.
The area of elder care is near to our heart as we, many friends and family members grapple with these realities on a day to day basis. We feel strongly that we can bring to bear both our technological and product development expertise as well as our direct life experiences to make a difference in this area – and this is exactly what we have set out to do!
Stay Tuned and sign up to be notified of updates related to this and other exciting development projects at Trusterra labs.