Communication is paramount in Jeff Gray’s goal to help seniors have what they need to live fuller lives; that’s an objective he’s accomplishing in two ways.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Care Card
The Care Card is a free app that assists memory patient caregivers in communicating with other care team members.
“We’re essentially serving the needs of family caregiving teams that have a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease or related dementia,” Gray said.
App users, he told the AJC recently, create profiles about loved ones that they can share with care teams. The experience, he said, should be as organic as opening a social media app.
“Think about things that are as easy to use as opening up Facebook or Instagram where you tap on the app and a caregiver that’s maybe never met mom or dad can scroll through and see who they are, where they’re from, what they like, what they don’t like, what helps calm them down, what are their favorite foods,” he said.
The app also supplies information about mobility issues and needs such as glasses and hearing aids, bringing users up to speed quickly and uniformly.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
“All things that take, in other settings, a long time, you can essentially acclimate someone and educate them as to the need of your loved one,” he said.
A shared timeline has a care notes feature, and those who pay a physical visit can post a photo there. Anything posted in the app, Gray said, goes out as an alert to a care circle, which could include children or other family members, along with third-party temporary caregivers like occupational or physical therapists. There’s also a care chat for family only.
Families can add professional caregivers to the larger care circle and delete them later, he said.
“One of the things we built the product around was the idea that things regarding care ought not probably live inside of standard text,” he said. “When (caregivers) leave, as the owner of the app, you just swipe them, literally, with a leftward swipe on their account, and they just disappear from the Care Card app. So, what that means is any communication that they were a party to is gone forever, and this is an important thing because so much caregiving communication today is residing on … people’s phones on a text screen that they probably don’t need to have or maybe shouldn’t have because they’re not a member of your family.”
Memory Kit
Gray’s time in the aging space has shown him there’s still a need for tangible, written products. And so, later this year, he’s overseeing the rerelease of the Memory Kit, a long-form, custom-made, hardbound book designed to hold a life biography.
The relaunching, he said, is “by popular demand because it’s asked by so many people if we can provide that product again, so we’ll be offering that in the fall of this year.”
Like its app counterpart, the Memory Kit lets care teams get to know people in memory care, and it also serves as a memento for family. Gray said he’s excited about adding back the physical book.
“What we found is that’s maybe more of a need than we realized at first,” he said. “In a world that is increasingly digital, I think the tangible becomes more and more important. All these digital things are great, and they’re wonderful. But you can’t sit with them after your mom is gone and open them up and touch them.”
Growth and challenges
One of the challenges Gray said he’s faced in growing the Care Card user network has been distribution. The app is now available in a licensed model for organizations that want to use Care Card technology to customize the experience for their own users, but that effort, he said, had to wait while COVID-19 was at its height. The fact that the app was published just before the pandemic began meant a delayed ability to make business calls to senior living home operators, he said, but the timing brought with it a silver lining: The team had extra space for testing and adjustments.
“It did give us the time to spend that time to enhance the app and make features better, test the feasibility and improve the product,” he said.
‘Ask yourself the hard questions’
As the organizer of Age Tech Atlanta, a community of entrepreneurs serving the aging space in innovative ways, Gray is in contact with numerous other entrepreneurs. He encourages contemporaries to examine the viability of business ideas from a usability standpoint.
“I often tell people … ‘Your story is not your business model,’” he said.
Often, he sees people beginning businesses to address problems they’ve experienced. Accolades from family, friends, and investors can buoy an idea, he said, but he encourages entrepreneurs to delve beyond personal motivations.
“Don’t forget to work on the business end and ask yourself the hard questions like, ‘Can I get anyone to download my app? When they download it, are there features in there that solve a huge problem so they’ll use it regularly?’” he said.
Care Card is available as a web app and for download from the Apple Store.
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