As more seniors age in their homes, the need for home-based care has soared far faster than the supply of home health care workers.
Brentwood-based Cairns Health Inc. is trying to address this growing care gap through its development of a digital health companion device. The company’s signature product, known as Luna, provides real-time, personalized two-way voice interactions that foster caregiver-patient interactions and reinforce daily care and medication routines. It uses radar technology to sense when patients approach and then engages the patients in conversation that includes reminders to take medications or take their blood pressure, for example.
“We need technology that aids care teams in reducing the cost to provide consistent quality of care for patients at home,” said Andrew Ritter, Cairns Health’s chief executive.
Last month, Cairns Health took a major step that it hopes will bolster Luna’s capabilities. The company acquired the Together by Renee health care app from Santa Monica-based SixD Inc., the company run by serial health-tech entrepreneurs Nick Desai and Renee Dua. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Desai and Dua launched an app called Renee that uses artificial-intelligence algorithms to assist patients and their caregivers with tasks such as medication refills and appointment scheduling. Two years ago, Desai and Dua expanded this app to include patient vital sign monitoring through smartphone technology. They called this expanded app Together by Renee.
“For customers, Together by Renee makes health care magically easy for those with chronic diseases, especially those which high blood pressure, which is a silent killer,” Desai said in a Business Journal interview at the time of the launch.
With its acquisition of the Together by Renee app last month, Cairns Health is seeking to turn its own Luna device into an overall digital health care companion with a full suite of home care capabilities.
“Now we can combine our voice communication with the vital signs scanning capability of Together by Renee,” Ritter said last week.
He added that with this new expanded capability, the Luna device will now be more appealing to assisted living and care facilities that often have to cope with nursing and care staff shortages.
