Older adults increasingly want to age in their homes rather than nursing facilities.
A study by the American Association of Retired People (AARP) found that nearly 90% of people over 65 want to stay in their homes as they grow older. That means there is plenty of work for home care agencies whose staff assist the elderly primarily only during the day and possibly only for a few hours a day or a week.
Technology built by Sensi.AI claims to help home care agencies virtually monitor the well-being of the elderly around the clock.
Sensi was founded by Romi Gubes in 2019 after she discovered that there was abuse in her five-year-old daughter’s childcare facility. She immediately took her daughter out but started thinking about how to prevent similar situations from happening to kids and other vulnerable populations. Gubes, an engineer who always dreamt of starting her own company, had the idea of using audio AI to analyze what may be happening with people who can’t advocate for themselves. She chose to work with audio because placing cameras in the home may feel intrusive to many people.
She decided to apply this technology to home care agencies, a fast-growing area amid the large desire for aging in place.
While various solutions help with emergencies, such as fall detection monitoring offered by OlaCare and SafelyYou, Gubes told TechCrunch that Sensi provides a more comprehensive overview of what’s going on. Not only can it help alert that the home care client has had an emergency like a fall, but also less urgent health problems like urinary tract infections, pneumonia and ‘good-to-know’ issues including change in activity levels, sentiment and lack of companionship, Gubes said.
Sensi works by placing simple audio pods similar to Amazon’s Alexa throughout the person’s home, but generally in the bedroom, the bathroom and the living/kitchen area. The company’s AI then continuously collects the audio and analyzes it for any variations from the baseline.
The company claims to identify over 100 insights about the well-being of seniors, and its clinical care team, which includes a social worker, an occupational therapist, nurses, and geriatrics clinicians, continuously develops new data points to track.
According to Gubes, Sensi AI’s technology is in high demand. Over 80% of the largest homecare networks in the United States are using Sensi to help monitor their clients’ physical, emotional, and cognitive needs.
The company’s revenue grew threefold year over year over the last three years, though Gubes wouldn’t share what the baseline was. She expects revenue to expand at the same pace over the next two years.
This fast growth has investors excited, too. On Wednesday, Sensi announced a $31 million Series B led by Insight Partners and Zeev Ventures, with participation from existing investors Entrée Capital, Flint Capital, Jibe Ventures, and Secret Chord Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to $53 million.
As for how innovations in generative AI are helping Sensi, Gubes said that launching new languages is a breeze with LLMs. The company is currently serving home care facilities based in the US and Israel, where Gubi is from. But it plans to expand to other countries with the help of new funding and GenAI capabilities.
“Now that there are no issues with coming up with new language models, the sky’s the limit for us,” she said.
