How AI helps prevent falls at Arizona senior living facilities
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Fellowship Square Mesa was the first U.S. facility to deploy AI-powered motion detector Paul. Photo: Courtesy of Helpany
Two years ago, a handful of assisted living facilities in metro Phoenix added a new member to the team to help reduce resident falls. His name is Paul, and he's an AI-powered motion detector.
Why it matters: Falls are among the most serious health risks for senior citizens, according to peer-reviewed medical research.
- About 30% of adults 65 and older experience at least one fall per year, resulting in 800,000 U.S. hospitalizations.
- The medical cost of fall injuries hit $31 billion in 2015, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services projects it will grow to $74 billion by 2030.
How it works: Paul looks like a smoke detector installed on the ceiling. There's no camera or audio recorder — instead it uses radar-based motion detection to analyze residents' stride lengths, instability, postures and gaits to determine fall risks, said Sandro Cilurzo, co-founder and CEO of Helpany, the tech company behind Paul.
- Paul compiles a daily report of residents' movement changes for staffers, flagging residents who may need extra assistance or a medical check-in.
- It also determines the 10 residents most at risk of falling on any given day and sends an alert when they attempt to get out of bed in the middle of the night so a staffer can assist them.
By the numbers: Fellowship Square Mesa consistently experienced an average of 20 falls per month among its 125 residents before Paul, assisted living director Tawnya Christensen told Axios.
- Within six months of Paul's January 2024 arrival, falls were down to about three per month, none of which occurred overnight or resulted in a life-altering injury.
- That's continued for almost two years now, she said.
The intrigue: Fellowship Square Mesa was the first U.S. facility to deploy Paul, and Christensen was skeptical, she told us.
- She's not anymore. In addition to fall prevention, she's also used Paul's motion tracking to diagnose residents in the early stages of infections, allowing them to get antibiotics and recover at home instead of having prolonged hospital stays.
- "It literally changes the trajectory of a person's life," Christensen said.
Flashback: Cilurzo told us he was inspired to create the fall-prevention tool after working for a hospital system in Switzerland and seeing how prevalent falls were among older adults.
- As the company's cybersecurity officer, he was tasked with finding a tool that would decrease falls, but he found there was nothing on the market to effectively analyze risk without sacrificing "privacy and dignity." So he invented Paul.
- It's now used by more than a dozen facilities in Arizona, and last year facilities in other states began using it.
What they're saying: "It sits by itself in the corner of the room and doesn't bother anybody," Ron Messenger, a resident at Fellowship Square, told Axios.
- Residents like Messenger can access their Paul data through an app to track their activity, sleep patterns and more.
- Messenger told us he's working to improve his sleep quality after learning from Paul that he wasn't getting enough restful hours.
The bottom line: "Paul is not preventing falls. Staff members are preventing the falls by having the right information," Cilurzo said.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to note that the first U.S. assisted living facility to deploy Paul was Fellowship Square Mesa (not Fellowship Square Historic Mesa).