Episode 76 - Introducing the "Watch Our Own" App with Giancarlo Paolillo and Sherrie Simms
Welcome to Caregiver Relief Podcast. I'm Diane Carbo, a registered nurse and founder of Caregiver Relief. Today we have some groundbreaking development in caregiving technology.
Watch Our Own, a revolutionary app that transforming how families manage caregiving responsibilities developed by Giancarlo Paolillo and his wife Sherrie Simms. They are both former caregivers. Both Geo Carlo and Sherry personally experienced the challenges and obstacles faced by many family caregivers.
With their knowledge and expertise, they translated their experience into the app, Watch Our Own. This innovative app addresses the growing challenges faced by millions of unpaid caregivers in the United States. I don't know if many of you know this, but there are over 56 million unpaid family caregivers and they provide over 650 million dollars of unpaid care in the U. S. with features on the watch our own. They manage care coordination, task tracking, GPS. Ball detection and secure communication all in one tool. Watch our own is set to be a game changer for families. Caregivers struggling work family and the immense responsibilities of caregiver.
Stay tuned as we explore how this app is redefining caregiving, empowering families, and alleviating the burdens on many caregivers. Giancarlo and Sherry, I'm so glad to have learned about your app, and I've been both a family caregiver and a professional caregiver. And people don't realize that one in five of us are a family caregiver in the U.S. right now. And so many family caregivers like yourselves are creating solutions to the obstacles they face during the caregiving journey. So welcome Giancarlo and Sherry. Thank you. Thank you, Diane. We looked at your website. We really liked what you guys are doing. Oh, thank you so much.
Right into environment. Sherry's mom was the registered nurse for about 40, 50 years. Yeah. Ah, and she was doing the same thing with a personal one-on-one care sometimes, and that she was also just taking care of somebody at home. Yeah. And we had different reasons why we went this way. Mm-hmm . But when Sherry and I met, I had two kids from a different, another marriage.
She helped me raise those and then my mom got sick. And, you know, with all these years of technologies, building companies like Vonage and everything else, that's when she said, why don't you go and build something for people like you that need this? And, well, I have to ask, I'm very impressed. You know, as a professional and a family caregiver, I'm always looking for things, especially now for my family caregivers that I support.
And I have to ask, are you guys involved in healthcare in any way? Because it is one of the most comprehensive apps I've ever seen. It's everything a family caregiver needs all in one space. It's funny you mentioned that. There's a hospital system out of New Jersey that is asking to talk to us, but this is very new for us.
We built the application to be more B2C so that the people could actually just use it. We have two versions of it. The freeware is the one that's currently available on iOS with Android coming out by the end of the year. And there's a premium version that's coming out after that where we tie in things like 24, 7 monitoring locations, video conferencing secured through our own video conferencing.
So it looks like this. You could have your whole team during an event. Take care of this but we also, we're building, I used to do a lot of predictive analysis engines for police departments in the 80s. So where's this type of crime going to take place? Where should you push your, your forces to?
And so we're moving more into the AI front. So there's going to be an assistant tied to the premium version to help you. So when you're setting up a task, who should be doing it based on the performance? When you're doing a medication, what other things about the medication do you need? No short term, long term effects.
Pretty much what kind of food you should be eating or avoiding your antibiotics. Don't need yogurt at the same time. That kind of stuff. If you've taken this particular pill, be careful because this, this is what it'll do to magnesium and what you should be doing. And that's a lot of stuff that you don't really get.
And it's out there and it's easy for an AI model to take care for you. So that's going to be coming out as far as the healthcare piece that you mentioned, that's exactly where we see this go on. We look at that healthcare efforts. Yes. Where we can provide this to the healthcare companies to provide that service to their people.
We would charge a very little bit amount which allows us to keep pushing the new features for the free version. Our goal is not to be rich doing this. Our goal is to be able to do, provide something that we could have used when this was happening over a decade ago. And, So that that's long winded version.
And this is what you need to tell me to stop. No, you're fine. I actually am very excited about your platform. And it is very comprehensive. In fact, one of the things I like was your task feature. And the way you explained it here, AI would give you the best determined qualifications for that task.
I recommend my team, my caregivers to create a care team partner approach to care. And this is where I think your app is going to be amazing because caregivers always feel that they are failures if they ask for help. And we can't. Allow them to continue to think that way because 63 percent of all family caregivers become seriously ill or die for the person they are caring for.
And it's very frightening. We need a way to get people to support with practical assistance to the caregiver, not the hands on stuff, but hey, Do you need the dog walk? Do you need your laundry done? Can I help with that? Can I sit with your family members so that you can get out and maybe go to church or get your nails done or whatever it needs to be done?
And that's what I liked about the task one because family caregivers, the majority of them, See that they have to do something they want it done their way and they are very rigid about allowing other people to come into their lives to support them and it's killing them the stress of killing them.
I would go further. There's not really a limitation that the caregiver is putting on anybody else. It's more what they expected to do. So there's like, oh, well, Sherry's taking care of her mom. So it's okay. She'll call us if she needs. She needs it. So she's never going to reach us. She's too busy. And we didn't have a platform to actually say, look, here's all the mom's stuff.
What can you help me with? Yes. Can you take her medicine? Can you do that? Can you clean her host? Can you, you know the basic things. Exactly. And it's just expected for that person to do it. And in my case, it was me that, I was taking care of my mom. She was helping with the boys. I couldn't even.
Give her a plan properly to say, okay, well, then he has this medicine. He's on this one. Evans has this one and it's just it becomes and I was working in new york So I had to leave the new york job to come start working at startups Just like we're walking around with her with a laptop to you know, just to allow us to get to all the treatments and that's it's just insane when when I started reading up about it, like why is there something not there?
That we can use what we created has a smaller version of the task, but if we built it in a way so it can all be blown out, so we want to see what when people use it, we want that feedback. We want to see. Okay. We like the task. What else can I do with a task or how can I do this? But great. We already built a whole back end engine for it.
And it's not a mobile app, so to speak. People get confused. There are about 60 services going on in the back end. All in the cloud. So it's a complete, when I build systems, I build them like for banking systems. So they're all with top level security, all extremely capable and scalable. And so this is what it was for, so we can keep adding more and more and more features to it.
That's awesome. Can you walk us through the key features of the app and how they work together to simplify caregiving? Sure you can do everything from setting up your care recipient's medicine, let's say, for example, and who's supposed to administer it. And if they didn't get administered, you see the daily task where you set up.
If they're behind time, if they're not, they didn't do it in the hour they're supposed to get it. If the care medic, let's say, for instance, just taking one sample and tying it to some of the other features, if, when you mark a locations that somebody has to be here at this point, or somebody has medicine they have to take, you can mark the importance of it.
If it's critical, we built a patented event engine. The event engine works like a police system environment. So essentially, when that happens, all of your connections, so you start with a group, you have somebody you want to take care of, you've got all the people that you trust, they get invited into this thing, you control what they can and cannot see.
You're the primary caregiver. It might be your child, it could be your mom. You get to decide who you want to have what level of access to and to that point. you If a medicine, for instance, that's more critical, is not given in the hour that they're supposed to, You can decide to make that an event issue.
I will generate an event to everybody in the group to see what's going on. The event is tied to them, to that task. So when you go to the event, it says, well, why are we having this event? Well, there's a task here that some, it didn't get done. You can open up the test at, well, Giancarlo was supposed to give mom this medicine.
Right there, you can call me in the app without having to leave the app and say, John, did you give mom the medicine? Yeah, I did. I just forgot to Mark it as complete and you close the event and it's all tied everything's marked down to the to the second so we have logging off all of it including opening up a 911 portal.
So you can see when somebody escalates from there you have things like task assignments that you can ask somebody to do. They can delegate it from that point. The medicine assignments, we have smartwatches that you can tie into and remotely see how your mom's breathing. And we can we only put one feature into that.
We can blow out the rest, but we want to see how people want to use it. One of the things that Sherry mentioned was like, let's put some thresholds, but there'll be things like you would be able to set this up the threshold. So, let's see, your mass blood pressure is 110 over over 70. And if it goes over 110 over 80, you want to get a notification, but you don't want to alert alarm everybody else.
Right? At that point, you can say, okay, this is my, you know, I'm a warm. Okay. Level and this is my critical level and if it gets a critical level then it will just send out and generate that event engine again where everybody gets notified and you have to go to the event and then see what's going on with mom, you know, so we want that to be we want feedback on this app so we can Polish the features that we want to.
So, okay, where do we put our efforts into one thing? I want you to understand the answer. We bootstrapped essentially everything ourselves with me doing all the architectural work and financial us putting all our savings into this.
So, we've yet to even gone to a funding stage. This is just something we want to put out there and we want to see the interest. And then from there, we'll go that way. But yeah. There's so many features in this thing. Like if you get to the event engine let's say your daughter is traveling somewhere and she doesn't know where she's at, she's not feeling well.
Right there, she can punch in, she opens the event, she can say, Show me near, nearby police, fire, or, Emergical facilities, and it'll take you right to it. You can communicate with everybody, group chat that you can have, it's all locked down by the way, Everything is secure, and it's yours.
So even, the video conference engine that we built for the group, if you want to record it, it's recorded onto your device, Not anywhere else, you have control. So if there's something that becomes a legal issue that tomorrow you want to share, You have it. We don't share data. That's another thing.
We don't, we don't make money off the data. So everybody wants to use that. Well, who's making more medicine and what are they? Yeah, that's your business. So we've gone through the whole HIPAA compliancy as well. So there, I can send you a list, but everything's from escalating to number one through the patent.
So event engine medicines, location schedules, guardian schedules. We have triggers for watch me now. That you can tell through Siri or whatever, you know, they say, watch me now, it'll just open up the event. If you're feeling unsafe all detection is tied in and you can select the sensitivity for your mom on the phone if that happens.
So that's just the first stage of it. I think once when the AI hits, you're going to see that there's going to be a lot more immediately when we start taking our AI model and we start plugging it in, it started coming up with. What about this? What about that? I'm like, okay, it's going to get interesting, but we can build until forever until we get feedback.
And people tell us this is this is great. But on the task piece, I just want to have an other section and I want to add whatever I want for that task. Right. I want to be able to sign it. And that's we need that feedback to keep working on the app. Well, the one of the apps you include is the GPS and fall detection.
I'm excited to hear about this technology. How does that work for the caregivers to give them a peace of mind? Yeah, it's essentially pretty easy. On the app itself, you have quite a bit of control on what you can do. I know this is a podcast but you have all the controls for sensitivity or how long to wait.
So the moment, if I drop the phone, it starts beeping right away and you can tell it will beep for a minute or 10 seconds to 20 seconds, whatever, before you create the event. And once it creates the event, it's going to. Everybody gets a message that mom possibly fell, but you can say, wait a minute and a half with two minutes.
And what, one of our advisors Cesar Baez, he, he keeps the phone on his sports jacket. Every time he puts out his sports jacket, he had it too sensitive. So it will go off. He was a great guinea pig for us to be able to test that out. Yes. Yes. Yeah., I can show you off how that works, but it's, we, what we use is, we leverage everything that's, we, first of all, we write everything in open source, but, so it's cheap.
That's what allows us to do this for free. Right. But we're using the built in sensors in the phone for that. Right. And as the sensors kept progressively better, we noticed that there's a lot more detail and more quality of the fall detection or shakiness of a phone that we can really target. As far as the, the location services, what we do is we did the first stage location services, which is what you get for free, which is, let's say your son or your daughter has to be in school at nine o'clock and they're not there.
Right? You want to see, well, they're not there, where are they? Are they just leaking into school? The bus not make it there? Is the, quality of the signal not working at the school? So you get, well, we show you the breadcrumbs and the location and the map. So when you go to the event it shows you, okay, this is where they're supposed to be.
This is where they are, they're just coming in later, you see them going the other way, you can get on the phone and say, get back to school, but it's you know, the, one that we're putting in with the premium version is the one, it's again, all open source, that allows you to track 24 7 location, our location, so at any point you can just go in to see where, what's grandpa, see, Okay.
Did he go on a walk about again or and if you depending on how detail you want to make it and that's up to you you can find out even the, the rate of speed that they're traveling at. Well I was really interested in that because we have. Like, as you said, we have people with dementia that you talk about, or they drive off and they get lost and can't be found.
So I thought, well, this is cool. Yeah, they got technology. Yeah. And you'll see this in the next release because the next version, the one that we're putting in for the premium side of things, especially for healthcare people who had that we noticed that they seem to have a pattern. Of where they go to.
They don't know why they go in there, but they go. So if you have, let's say, two or three weeks worth of your dad's walkabout routine, or you know that, and now they're missing, even if he forgot to take the phone, you can still contact the authority and say, well, look, I know on Tuesdays, this is normally where he goes.
And you can provide that information that they could look for that guy wearing that jacket or whatever he may have. Right, right. And detect him. Wow, that that's pretty impressive. Can you tell me in what ways do you believe that our Watch Our Own fosters collaboration among family members and caregiving teams?
Oh, well, first of all, a lot of these services and jump in any time you want. I'll still be honest, but, watch your own. We only, we believe that nobody but you is going to take care of that person as well as anybody else. , you can go to the third party event and what do they do?
They read off a list. It's a script. Okay. Tell me how you're feeling. Tell me these things. But you know who that person is. You know their tics. And the people that you invite to collaborate, they're what? , if it's your mom, there's going to be you, your sister, your, your husband, your, your brother, the people that know that person that know how to communicate, they're, they care.
You know, and so, setting up that group mentality, where you're sharing everything, that, nothing's hidden, and you, and you have to communicate, and I saw that in one of your articles that was very well written by you, saying that really, there's no lack of communication, that you have to communicate, and people, one of the targets that we found that will be interesting, What that we didn't even realize there was a market for is we're all getting older, but we're not growing together.
So as we get older, we move apart and you see women are living their spouses and, you know, and so forth. And when they do that, they have their own cliques. And, you know, the guys hanging out with their own groups and females like to go out and they have their own friends. And one lady who we interviewed for one of the beta programs mentioned like, look, I don't have kids, but my friends are always worried about me, and it'd be great if I had this just to be able to say, look, I'm over here.
You don't have to worry. You can see where I'm going, you know, so, and they're fine. So, it's that whole network. It's yeah, that whole network and village mentality, right? Well, I'm even going to take that a little further. There's always typically standard wise. There is one family caregiver. Everybody else is on has uninvolved siblings or extended family members.
And what I see is these people are usually judgmental of the care provided. And the family caregiver gets taken advantage of in so many ways. So I like the thought that yes, you're going to have tasks and everybody's going to be aware and they're going to be expected to step up to the plate to help at a challenging time.
I agree. You've been listening to us in the background because, that was the biggest frustration with her mom and with my mom essentially, well, John has it, so, and if they didn't like something that, like, if you're taking it to a particular hospital, or you're doing treatment, why are you taking it here?
Why are you not taking it there? Yep. We, I used to tell some of my family members, I said, if you want an opinion, buy an opinion. Yeah. , you know, put your skin in the game. Yeah. Because it, you know, or they would tell me, oh, where are you moving? Where are you moving mom to? We, like, we're thinking about visiting her.
She's in hospice. Uhhuh, she know you're there. Oh. But , but it, it literally, my mom had passed and two weeks later, one person says, I'm thinking about visiting her. Like, let's going to be a neat trick. But , but it's a hundred percent,, they just, it, things need to be delegated and people need to be accountable.
And the visibility into that, if you have the. You know, the, the task listed and you have the transparency within this group. They can't say, well, I didn't know what you were doing all this. I love that. I love that. Yeah, I just assume, like you said, John Carlo has it or Sherry has it or Dan has it, but it's like this visibility of like, hey, do you have any idea what it takes?
No. On a weekly basis or a daily basis to take care of mom. Here it is. Yeah, I agree. And the other thing that we have right now is, for the first time in history, we have a public health crisis. We have more seniors than youth. And the low birth rate has prevented us from the youth of our country are our tax base.
The youth of our country, our workforce. And now we are in a challenging time where we don't have enough youth to even care for our seniors. And there's a lot of seniors. Like I'm a baby boomer, the millennials on down. are even going to be struggling even further to get care provided for them because of this low birth rate.
So what I like about Watch Our Own is you do absolutely encourage fostering a collaboration among everybody. Absolutely. That's the main goal. Yep. Yes. There's a missing thing here too that, that some people are, you have to, for no reason, because of a geographic reason, you have to pay somebody to come in and take care of your mom, right?
How well do you know they're being taken care of? Yep. And so you force that person to use the app. It's they can use it for free. Just use the app and part of that's going to force them to. Okay. Why didn't mom get her medicine at 10 o'clock? Why didn't you do this at 11 o'clock? You can see what's what's been done.
If the person says that they gave him the medicine and then your mom goes into cardiac arrest, she goes into something else that they're, they know you're watching and people react differently when you're watching. It's sad. But they do it. You know what? I agree. I can't agree with you more. I in fact, I encourage my family caregivers when they do have people coming into the home to put nanny cams around because you can never be Too careful.
Yeah, no, I could. Absolutely. The age of trust went away with the video camera. With the moment people realize that, oh, you really can't trust. And so in reality, it hits you. But not to your point. It's a, We're also looking at the health, like when you mentioned the health care, we really think, if you look at these health care companies look what just happened with UnitedHealth, they need to start providing services for their own people, and it's sad because if you look at it, caregivers lose their jobs, they put, there's a Crazy number of how companies are losing money because they're top performers that become all of a sudden other caregivers Yep, they're not able to work at the level that that was being profitable for them They're still working above level but not at that level that made them the top performer and that is forget the stress Forget everything else companies should be using services like this say look we get it Here's the service that, we're willing to pay the 2 a month to give you the service so you can help you get your life back.
And health companies should be doing the same thing. If you have something that essentially monitoring everything you're doing down to the minute, and you can see what's going on, if, and during an event, everybody's is called, and you can see when the event took place, who came on the call, who's the person in charge?
Wait a minute, you're the primary caregiver, Diane, so you get to trump that. Okay. And the application says, Oh, wait, if you're the primary caregiver, do you want to take over this event and you get to say, yeah, the other person gets a message that you're taking over because you're the mom, you're the dad, whatever you have every right and everything's logged from an insurance point of view that we all know that the biggest problem, with taking care of somebody is getting there when something happens.
So they had a stroke, you have what about an hour or so. Before you can get you can do anything to help. Yeah, nobody knows. So when they're really going to get this open now, we actually have a tracking down to the nanosecond of when who's in call or involved, involved, what you had to open, what's taking place.
When did they open up the 911? The whole bit and imagine a healthcare company that can provide that to the customers for a couple of bucks a month And it works a couple of bucks We're talking under five bucks a month for the premium version with all the bells and whistles And here you go. Just give it to them for free this is something we see a RP should be doing or, even, the amec.
Yeah. We can oh, I, I know who they are, the A MAC, but they're like a RP. They need to get involved and hear about these things. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and the thing is, that's weird though. Everybody I talk to, they go, well, why you're giving it for free. How come they're not pushing this, your solution?
And I go, nobody knows who we are. And trying to get into these markets, even with people two, or two advisors are Cesar Baez, and one of them is a very well known guy, Royal Campos, who at one point was reporting directly to Obama. And them trying to get somebody to respond, it's almost impossible unless you know somebody in the network.
That's it's frustrating to when you say, but it's about caregiving and we're giving it for free and it's a wonderful tool. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's an amazing tool. And I guess people need to know, you know, that that it is good. Now, what have what kind of response have you had from caregivers who've used the app so far?
So on the ones that we did the two beta for the secondary beta was actually the better one because everybody there was a caregiver. And when they looked at it, go, oh my God, I could have used this when we were going through this, or we're going and, and we hadn't rolled out at the time. We was just giving them access to the test flight solution.
We get, you can sign up and you can download the app when you get all the updates and all the new features. And they were just going, they, they're the ones that helped us. We had to rewrite the whole ui, the whole front end, the whole view. 'cause it was two technical, we actually, we wind up actually removing some of the features.
And it says just so much in there that when you show it to somebody, they go, this is great. And they go, just play with it. About a year ago, they go, yeah, but I can't find it. And I go, okay, we gotta fix this. And so they were great at providing us that easy flow and what we need to change. And this is why we're putting it for free as well, because we see the free version for everybody who just can't afford that extra five bucks a month.
And let's face it, we're in that world right now where, look at the labor force and what's going on. Yeah, five bucks a month is a lot nowadays. So if you want to, if you can live without the artificial assistant that costs us a lot of CPU power, then you can use all the features, but the other stuff is where you have to pay a couple of bucks a month for it.
And I would love to see our government officials invest some money into that, and provide this to our citizens that are desperately needing this. How easy for caregivers with varying levels of technical experience is it for them to use this app? Well, the people that we tested with do not have any technical background.
, the first version of this about a year and a half ago, two years ago you, you probably would have needed a computer science degree but it was way too techie. And that's my background. That's my fault. I built solutions for companies and I never really had to look at the look and feel so much.
I was just make sure it worked perfectly. But so this is where. The brains of the company came in and said, no, and so now it's a lot easier. Like she can just bounce around and I just like we give I have the version. She looks at it and we have we went through a complete US effort to make sure that anybody can just download it.
We have a video helps. We have a whole video session. We can click on each feature and it walks you through what to do. So that's there. And any new feature that we're putting in, we just keep updating that and made it really, really easy to make that. So, so it's very intuitive and we're holding your hand the entire time.
That's great because a lot of caregivers are so stressed that they need that's what I when I do my courses or everything. I just spoon feed them little bits at a time. So they can absorb the information and move on to the next step. So that was a wise on on your part. Well, you know what it is, Dan. It's the way we think.
Our brains work exactly like a computer. And if your priority algorithm is now taking over the fact that you're worried about mom, everything else is going to be, you're partially listening to it. You're not listening to 100%. You can't. That's more important. Exactly. So how can listeners download and start using the app today?
They can just go right to, to Apple and and if they go, we have the website up, it takes you as a built in link to it. To the Apple store and as soon as the Android is available by the end of the year, that'll be enabled as well, so you can just go and click on it and just download it, sign yourself up, create your group, invite the people that you trust, and create the profile for, for the person you want to do this for if they have a smartphone, great, because then you can track them and you can do all the other stuff, if they don't have one, they become a virtual user, and like, you know, and then you can do stuff for them, like a very young person, or an elderly who's just not going to, you know, Look at this.
And I'm from your baby boom area, by the way, Diane. So, it's trust me, and my mom would have never used this. She was in her 80s. She would have just looked at the phone and gone, Giancarlo, you're crazy, I can't. It's, it's out there. The link, you can just look type in Watcharon on the Apple Store and you'll see it.
Great. So, last question. What's your vision for how Watch Our Own can change caregiving for families around the world?
We would love to have this tied in with third party. One of the things we built was we built a merchant network back end. We haven't introduced that yet. Because what we want to be able to start doing is creating the partnerships for the companies that really want to make a difference and say, okay, so you, you, I can't get to mom, but I want to get her something.
So let's get like a a distribution channel to bring her that food or like Uber Eats, but in anywhere in the world or, or third party cleaning services or stuff like that, just to keep get as a group. They can then have a pool of money they can put into. That they can distribute those services across, that they can manage through the service.
Because that's the other thing, where's the money coming from? Always the, the primary caregiver. Right? And even there's no way for other family members even to contribute. So that's the kind of stuff where I see the, that being much more into that niche uhhuh, where it's one place you go to, you start using it.
The health companies cannot, can give it because it allows them to be able to share. Not just the the mental language, but the financial responsibility, right? They come along with all this. Well, with so many seniors having no children, I can see attorneys elder care law attorneys using this to keep track of their clients and oversee or even a fiduciary.
Who is covering the financial aspect of a scene. No power of attorney or family member. So I can really see where this can go very huge in, in several different markets. So I'm really excited about that. Yeah. So that's, that's, we, we're not looking, we're, we're just want to be, we don't want anybody to go through what we did without at least having a tool.
And again, Diane, what we're looking for right now is that feedback. For people who look at this and say, we see that you have this, but we'd like to see more of that part. And then we go, good. We can point our efforts to that. We, we want to get that view. Right. Very wise. Now, while, while the silver tsunami is starting to hit us, because , it's the, oldest of the baby boomers turns 80 in 2030.
And the youngest is hitting retirement next year. So all at the end of retirement. So you're at the tail end. I was near the closer to the beginning of the baby boomer. So we have a real crisis on our hands and this is a real solution. So I'm excited to my family caregivers out there. Just remember, you are the most important part of the caregiving equation.
Without you, it all falls apart. So please, practice self care every day, because you are worth it.
