NIA-funded small business spotlight: SafelyYou trains AI to improve care for older adults

Each year, one in four U.S. adults age 65 and older has a fall, making falls the leading cause of injury and injury-related death for older individuals. In assisted living communities, falls are among the most common and dangerous events for residents and can often lead to injury. Older adults are at higher risk of falls because of age-related health conditions; therefore, fall prevention is integral to aging research.

With Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) seed grant funding from NIA, artificial intelligence (AI) technology company SafelyYou is committed to reducing falls in assisted living communities, where people who are at higher risk of falls - including those living with dementia or mild cognitive impairment - tend to reside. SafelyYou harnesses the power of video and AI to detect falls faster and ultimately help prevent occurrences.

Todd Haim, Ph.D., NIA senior advisor on biomedical innovation, noted the synergies between NIA's mission and the way SafelyYou's products can improve lives: "Providing entrepreneurs and small businesses seed funding for innovations that have the potential to help prevent falls aligns closely with NIA's mission to help older adults live longer and more independent lives."

From personal passion to professional project

SafelyYou's mission is deeply personal to its founder and CEO, George Netscher, who is motivated by his own life experiences. Many of the women on his mother's side of the family, including his grandmother and aunt, have faced significant cognitive impairment from Alzheimer's as they aged. As Netscher's own mother approached her mid-70s - the same age at which his other family members began showing signs of cognitive decline - he wanted to find a way to help.

To narrow his focus for greatest impact, Netscher homed in on falls. If assisted living residents have memory problems, they may struggle to recall how they ended up on the ground after a fall and forget to alert staff to the severity of the fall, which leads to precautionary emergency room (ER) visits. Each year nationwide, there are 3 million visits to ERs for treatment after a fall, resulting in about 1 million hospitalizations.

George Netscher, M.S., founder and CEO of SafelyYou.

Netscher thought that AI could help. As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley's Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, he set up a system of cameras to record people moving around a bedroom. Netscher developed an AI-based algorithm to detect automatically when an individual falls. The video footage could be used to determine the cause, whether the event is bad enough to warrant a trip to the ER, and how to take preventive actions in the future.

Scaling up with NIA investment

After earning a master's degree, Netscher used initial Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) funds from the National Science Foundation to launch his academic research project into a product - SafelyYou. Netscher and his graduate school advisor, Alexandre Bayen, Ph.D., tested SafelyYou's AI technology in a memory care facility. The company's first system enabled staff to review the video footage that the AI technology identified as relevant to the fall; in most cases, an ER visit was determined to be unnecessary, which produced an 80% reduction in ER visits for that community's residents.

Netscher wanted to ensure the results from the first study were not based on chance, and NIA saw the promise in his pilot efforts. SafelyYou applied for and received Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding from NIA in 2017 to test its technology's reproducibility across 11 memory care communities. Residents had to opt in to the system, and 90% agreed to have it installed and run over the course of several months. The study showed a 41% reduction in falls and a 69% reduction in ER visits by using the video footage to determine the severity of the falls that did occur and to perform corrective actions to prevent future falls.

"That research was about us validating that we could really help," Netscher said. "That was where NIA funding was critical, because it enabled us to perform vital testing in facilities."

The company received three subsequent SBIR grants from NIA totaling more than $2.8 million to advance its research toward commercialization. Now, with more than $70 million in Series A and B funding, SafelyYou technology has been installed in more than 450 communities nationwide.

The future of AI-aided care

The SafelyYou system is now expanding to solve new challenges. In one facility, a resident was sliding out of bed repeatedly. Instead of needing to sift through hours of video, the staff learned through SafelyYou's AI monitoring that the resident, who cared for two dolls, kept sliding out because the dolls took up too much space. Staff solved the issue with a crib for the dolls, leaving the resident safe in her bed alone.

A camera enabled with SafelyYou's technology.

"We can do an effective root cause analysis of accidents," Netscher said. "That's effectively what our system enables." Conducting that kind of analysis for someone with cognitive impairment without SafelyYou's AI system would mean a huge time investment for staff.

The company's products now detect about 20,000 similar fall- or safety-related events per month across all installations. With a growing list of customers, the AI software has more data for training, making it even more effective. The system is accurate enough now that it can detect if someone hit their head during a fall.

"The way AI works is, the more data you get, the harder and harder problems you can approach," Netscher said. Nursing homes have other events to keep track of besides falls, such as medication compliance. SafelyYou isn't sensitive enough to help manage medication - yet - but that's a possibility in the future.

In 2024, SafelyYou is launching another product called Clarity, which uses AI to assess assisted living communities to determine how much and what type of care residents are receiving. Clarity aims to help organizations gain a better understanding of where care is needed. "Are we allocating our resources in the right places?" Netscher said. "Things like that are an incredibly important piece of the puzzle."

Ultimately, Netscher sees room for SafelyYou to improve care at assisted living communities where staffing and resources are limited.

Part of the solution, he said, is technology that helps staff do a better job keeping residents safe. "AI is the enabling technology of our generation, of this decade. We have this massive need, and we have this potential solution."

• Could NIA's small business funding help you translate your idea into impact?

  Learn more about bringing innovations to market with support from NIA's Small Business Programs.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.