Report: Medical monitoring products to push home health market

The home health monitoring market is expected to generate higher revenues from services that are based on using monitoring products, according to a recent report published by research company Parks Associates.

In a report, entitled "The Role of IP in Revitalizing PERS", Parks said that the Personal Emergency Response Service (PERS) market is currently changing as it is re-introducing services as a more modern care concept. The report indicates that technology, particularly IP-enabled technology innovations in hardware, software, and service platforms, is driving the market transition.

"We in Aerotel defiantly feel that demand for services that use advanced monitoring solutions," said Ofer Atzmon, Vice President for Business Development and Marketing at Aerotel Medical Systems. "Products such as our GeoSkeeper offer a new level of safety beyond existing PERS and traditional social alarm systems."

GeoSkeeper

Parks analysts said that the long-term threat to the PERS industry incumbents comes from new senior independent living solution providers. These players offer a complete suite of software and service components that address needs for proactive risk assessment, self-care for chronic conditions and wellness, social communication, and health education/lifestyle adjustments.

They said that these providers offer PERS service as complementary and sometimes complimentary, service. The technology platform on which these capabilities are offered has to be IP-enabled, and this platform's cost will only go down as technology matures and operational scale builds.

The authors, Harry Wang and Jennifer Kent, said that the market is changing as new senior-friendly services, using either IP or traditional phoneline-based communications infrastructure, are now offered. They estimated that PERS services are expected to transform into a full-fledged senior independent living solutions.

Wang and Kent concluded that in the future, the market will become less fragmented and IP-based service infrastructure and IP-connected monitoring devices will be two of the change agents to give the PERS industry a rebirth.