An increasing number of elderly people are choosing to spend their retirement years at home rather than in a nursing home.
A survey by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) found that about 90% of people over the age of 65 want to continue living in their own homes as they age, meaning there's plenty of work for home care agencies that care for seniors primarily during the day, and sometimes just a few hours a day or week.
Sensi.AI claims that the technology it has developed will help home care agencies virtually monitor the health of elderly people round the clock.
Sensi was founded in 2019 after Romi Gubes learned of abuse taking place at the daycare center where his 5-year-old daughter attended. Gubes quickly removed her daughter from the center, but began thinking about how to prevent a similar situation from happening to children and other vulnerable people. An engineer who always dreamed of starting his own company, Gubes came up with the idea to use voice AI to analyze what is happening to people who cannot advocate for themselves. Gubes chose to work with audio because installing cameras in their homes can be intrusive for many people.
She decided to apply the technology to home care agencies, a fast-growing sector due to the strong demand from seniors to stay in the places they are familiar with.
While various solutions such as fall detection monitoring offered by OlaCare and SafelyYou address emergency situations, Gubes told TechCrunch that Sensi offers a more comprehensive picture. In addition to alerting homecare clients when they experience an emergency such as a fall, Gubes said it can also alert them to less urgent health issues like urinary tract infections or pneumonia, as well as “nice to know” issues like changes in activity levels, emotions or lack of companionship.
Sensi works by placing simple audio pods, similar to Amazon's Alexa, around the home, typically in bedrooms, bathrooms and the living room/kitchen, then the company's AI continuously collects audio and analyzes changes from a baseline.
The company claims to have identified more than 100 insights into the health of older adults, and its clinical care team, which includes social workers, occupational therapists, nurses and geriatrics clinicians, is continually developing new data points to track.
Gubes said Sensi AI's technology is in high demand: More than 80% of the largest home care networks in the U.S. use Sensi to monitor the physical, emotional and cognitive needs of their clients.
While Goubes declined to share baseline figures, the company's revenue has tripled year-over-year over the past three years, and he expects it to grow at the same pace over the next two years.
That rapid 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 generative AI innovation is helping Sensi, Gubes said that with an LLM, introducing new languages is easy. The company currently serves home care facilities based in the U.S., where Gubes is from, and Israel, but with the help of new funding and GenAI capabilities, it plans to expand to other countries.
“Now that it's no longer a problem to come up with new language models, the possibilities are endless for us,” she said.