| LogicMark’s CEO on Difficult Conversations, AI, and the Human Element

| The personal safety and connected care technology company LogicMark recently published findings from a survey about Gen Z’s attitudes about caregiving:

• 90% of current family caregivers show burnout symptoms, with the impact falling hardest on Gen Z
• 62% of Gen Z said caregiving cuts into their job performance, compared to 44% of Millennials and 45% of Gen X. 
• 50% of Gen Z say caregiving has damaged their personal relationships, outpacing Millennials (41%) and Gen X (38%) 

The survey reveals what the company calls “a crisis of avoidance in family caregiving.” We spoke to Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark, about these results and how her company is responding.

What about the surveys stood out for you?

Only 19% of older U.S. adults have had a detailed conversation with their loved ones about what they actually want, when it comes to care. We also know that 64% of caregivers are nervous and scared and concerned.

What do you think is behind this data?

To the extent that we have not thought of traditionally Gen Z-ers as caretakers, I think we’re all living a little longer. And while we may be living longer, we may not be living healthier. It was a wake-up moment to see that in a survey and say, “Here’s a population that we never really think about when it comes to caregiving.” And they are making the first considerations of what it means to enter a sandwich generation experience. 

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How do these issues affect you personally? 

I’m right smack dab in the middle of the sandwich generation. In addition, my nephew is 29 years old, and his mom is sick from cancer. And he’s the only child as well. His father is retired. It’s a small family, where my husband is her only sibling left and her parents have passed. I think a lot about what it means to have a larger care village of people who can help him with his mom. 

What makes LogicMark different from other agetech companies?

We’re really a human-centric product development company, which means that what we’re really interested in is understanding where the friction points are and where people are experiencing problems and concerns and then going to build new products. It does not have to be the shiniest, newest toy, but we’re looking for the right combination of technology.

How do you find that combination?

 A lot of it is actually going out and talking to people. We’ve already heard from and spoken to a lot of customers, but we really wanted to even branch out further and talk to even a larger base of customers and start asking questions about the issues around caretaking that we may be able to resolve.

What are the solutions beyond technology?

When it comes to caretaking, it’s about discussions. It’s about dialogue before things happen. Having those really uncomfortable discussions really early and then putting in place the structure, the communication structure, the care structure. Technology could be part of that, to basically support the aging process and to know that you have that village to help.

These are issues that affect all segments of the economy.

Recently we’ve had some discussions with folks who are in the benefits business. It was about: How do we, in light of the survey that we were sharing with them, work with corporations on providing the infrastructure to help with that fear and apprehension about time away from work? 

How is your company using AI? And what guardrails do you have in place?

We have more than 50 patents for a 33-person company. And I’ve only been here since June of 21, so we’ve been very busy. It’s all around things like tokenization of data and sharing of data. We have a very focused understanding of how that gets deployed. We try to do edge computing, which means that the devices actually do some initial AI computing and data resides there. Data that gets passed into the cloud are tokenized, so that we actually can protect the data, especially because we are dealing with such an important area, which is healthcare. And we’re sometimes in people’s homes with the Freedom Alert Max product, we actually have video chats between a caretaker and their loved ones, but that can only be triggered in an emergency. You can’t just pop into Mom’s device like, “Hey, how’s it going?” That has to be triggered, because who wants their adult kids to pop in on them when they’re playing Mahjong? Not cool. 

What’s something that AI is really good at?

One is the longitudinal daily tracking of data, which has significant impact longitudinally. For example, if you’re going from 5,000 steps to 4,000 to 3000 over 8 to 12 weeks, we want to match that pattern with your med intake and adherence to meds. Only 48% of people are adherent to meds, which is horrible. We want to use AI to help us do that type of computational work and longitudinal remote monitoring that you’re not going to get, even when you send a caretaker professionally to visit your parents every day. They’re there half an hour, an hour every day. They’re not there all hours of the day. So they’re not going to know your parents wake up at 12 midnight, open the door, walk out and then walk back in. And that only started happening last week. This increased pattern could be Alzheimer’s. 

What’s something that only humans can do?

We work with an amazing, five-diamond-certified 24/7 monitor service. They have an 18-month training cycle. They get re-certified really consistently so that people stay with them for years. We want that because we want people who care and love their jobs. The best example I can give is that there was an Instacart delivery person who felt something was off. Something is wrong here. She walks in, the house was filled with, you could smell gas. So she saved that guy’s life. What we want to do is put a human at the point where people are most vulnerable and take the lifting that human beings typically have to do around monitoring and processing and take it off their shoulders.