The Jivus Project
Jun 19, 2019
I started The Jivus project, in my head a long time ago. As a Gen X er that has been part of the most explosive and expansive growth of Information Technology and looking towards the prospect of aging, I wanted to think of how tech enabled process may help me or many like us age at home or at a place of our choice. In 2020 August, after taking a break from the last company I founded, WellHive, I decided to work on it with my son. He researched the following areas.
Why are the elderly forced to move out of their own homes?
What are the various settings (i.e. places such as nursing home, hospitals etc.) where the elderly are forced to move?
What are the common complications that occur when older people are staying at home and what are their causes?
What are the cost implications (e.g. How much do families spend, how much does the government spend)?
What programs, if any, exist in the US that support Aging in Place?
What are some of the different models that are followed in other parts of the world. What are the pros and cons of those models?
That started the Jivus Project. Through it I wanted to explore models of care that will make Aging At Home a comfortable, safe and dignified alternative to aging populations and their families. The project aspires to invent, discover and implement solutions that combines innovative processes and technology that can provide the human touch yet making it a scalable and sustainable solution as people live longer lives with growing cost of care.
Hypothesis
Making Ageing At Home feasible will require a variety of methods and practices. In the past, because families were large and lived together, with some level of shared burden among various members of the family, the aged were able to live at home. As families have become more nuclear and more geographically dispersed, the potential for shared burden has almost but disappeared. More often than not, a single family member ends up taking a significant part of the burden or in the case when that is not possible aging at home becomes incredibly difficult or impossible.
My initial hypothesis is that in order to continue to enjoy the well being and quality of life that the elderly expect and deserve, significant human engagement is necessary. For example, in the absence of a joint family structure, it maybe entirely possible for a person to age at home if the person had full-time nurses and care aides living with the person. But this is not a feasible option for the majority of the population due to cost and availabilty of such resources. Even if we did not have the resource problem, while most people will likely enjoy the interactions and presence of others at their home for certain times of the day yet they maybe uncomfortable with the idea of having them at their home all the time.
I believe that a tiered model of attention, i.e. interactions and monitoring by people, can make it possible for elders to successfully age at home. In the past this attention may have been provided by a nearby family member that may quickly step in for say some unusual noise associated with a fall or lack of response or changes in patterns. Through the Jivus Project I hope we can explore if such attention can be provided remotely and by relatively lay people i.e. people without the thorough training of a fully trained clinical caregiver, and can, through the use of technology, augment the activities of more trained resources by providing the first tier of attention as part of a more comprehensive pathway. In this pathway more advanced trained resources are brought in incrementally as the situation requires, in a manner that is similar to more established methods such as Nurse triage protocols. If such methods are possible, I hypothesize that it will make a larger pool of resources available to the needs of the elderly, while creating new, meaningful job opportunities for more people. With these approaches the hope is to enable Aging in Place, if not completely, then at least increase the length of time before they have to move to some of the more traditional care settings.
What does Jivus mean ?
Jivus is a made up name, combining the Sanskrit/Hindi word jīv (Hindi: जीव) that means living being, or any entity imbued with a life force and the Latin word vivus meaning "alive". Both words have the same Indo-European roots. Hopefully, together it expresses the aspirational goal of creating a solution that provides comfort and care to living beings while making them feel alive by helping them live in the settings of their choice.
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