As specific organs reduce functioning, some seniors living at home need to revise their recipes to avoid complex collections of foods just as TIAs and other problems reduce their ability to deal with the challenges. To-go food does not work. For some families, hospital-style food may mimic the diet they are accustomed to, but for immigrants, traditional hospital food may be horrific. Older people tend to rely on a very limited set of dishes, so that custom tailoring recipes may be cost effective. There are dietitian-run food delivery services, but not ones that create meals from clients' recipes. Affluent market tends to live away from their parents. The pain point is my co-worker telling me, "Food is killing my dad, and there is nothing I can do about it unless I quit this job and move home, which would be disastrous for my spouse and kids. As far as I can tell, I have to know how to solve the problem and just sit here, 3,000 miles away, and watch him die." I think this market would pay a premium.
>> There are dietitian-run food delivery services, but not ones that create meals from clients' recipes.
The problem is that you need volume for it to make sense. One way to get that is aggregating a few people who want the same recipe. The other way is ordering those meals, frozen, for a bunch of days.
I completely agree. I think that one of the big problems, aside from someone cooking a family recipe while also modifying it slightly so its diet appropriate, is somehow going beyond just making and delivering this food. My grandfather is 89, his wife is 17 years younger than him so she still cooks for him and makes sure hes eating. On the flipside, once my grandfather died on the other side of the family, my grandmother fell to pieces and alzheimer's rapidly set in. Is there somehow a cost effective way of creating these dishes either at the client's house or maybe delivering the meal and providing an hour of genuine conversation? I mean I guess it'd be a specialized home health aide at that point or something. I guess just sticking with the family recipe modified for dietary needs is the smart way to start off. You could follow this up with partnering with old age communities/nursing homes and providing this custom service en masse.
Same exact story on my grandparents. Once the healty one is gone, the other one sees a drastic reduction in quality of life as well as life expectancy.
The cost incourred for at-home help with a dedicated easter european colf were huge. Might still be a couple of decades away but i can totally see a model where you rent a house robot that takes care of cooking, personal cleaning and limited interaction (no need to have super intelligent AI when chatting to a 80 years old man with Alzheimer)
I know I speak to a computer 99% of the day (programming, games, movies, sms, maps, etc), but please kill me before my future son gives me an AI to talk to. I agree with the cooking and showing me movies, but our jobs as sons can't be replaced.
On the other hand, if the robot makes snapchats with the elderly, that would be a way to bring our parents back into our lives.
"ELIZA's creator Joseph Weizenbaum thought the idea of a computer therapist was funny. But when his students and secretary started talking to it for hours, what had seemed to him to be an amusing idea suddenly felt like an appalling reality." http://www.radiolab.org/story/137466-clever-bots/
In the meantime, parents need safe food. If anyone goes for this, good luck!
