If you live Southern California or plan to be there May 9th, you’ll want to know about the UCLA Technology & Aging Conference. The one-day event looks at medical and consumer technology aimed at improving life as we age, and how the changes will influence the future of health care. Notables on the program include Gary W. Small MD, director of UCLA’s Center on Aging, and Eric Dishman, who directs Intel’s product research and innovation group. Star power will be supplied via a luncheon address from actor and author Kirk Douglas, who will talk about the emotional and physical challenges of stroke recovery.

Is it spying on Mom or Dad, or a technology that’s about to take off? Sue Shellenbarger’s Work & Family column in the Wall Street Journal looks at a raft of new technologies that offer peace of mind to seniors and children providing care who want to keep tabs. Her conclusion: privacy issues aren’t a big concern, and families like the monitoring. This business appears to be really moving, fueled by the huge number of long-distance caregivers. A 2004 Metlife study identified 34 million Americans providing care to older adults, with 15 percent of those living at a long distance. Key players include QuietCare Home Health Security Systems, which uses motion sensors to detect seniors’ motion and comings and goings, and feeds data to a network that customers can monitor via a website. We’ve also noted heavy R&D and product commitments from tech giants like Intel and Honeywell.

The WSJ piece also features an interesting companion video.

A growing number of technology companies are developing solutions for monitoring aging parents from a distance. CNET offers a good roundup on companies offering alert devices that notify Boomer-aged children when their parents take their medications (or don’t). Some of the devices actually dispense medications, as well. We’ve reported previously on Intel’s ambitious aging in place initiative, which aims to help people age in place and stay connected with health care providers. There’s potential here for a multibillion dollar industry to emerge. Key questions: Who will bring the products to market, and how will consumers pay for them?

Eons introduced content voting this week. If you like what you read, click the “Boom It” button at the top of the item. Other users can view your top-rated picks, and the most popular content makes it out to the home page. Also new on the site this week: a travel portal [via Dick Stroud].

Intel Corp. is one of several major companies developing technology products aimed at helping people age in place and stay connected with health care providers. The products are in research phase at this point, but have the potential to have a significant impact on quality of life and yield huge savings in health care costs as the population ages. The market potential is enormous: in a 2004 study, Forrester Research projected the overall market for personal medical monitoring could blossom to $34 billion by 2015.

Others working in this area include MIT’s Age Lab, Philips, ADT and Qualcomm.

Intel’s Health Systems Research Lab is working on sensor networks tied to software applications that can monitor a patient’s condition in the home—and provide connectivity solutions to link the patient to health providers, family members and others. Steve Agritelley, who directs the Laboratory, presented at the What’s Next conference this past week; we sat down with him to ask a few questions about Intel’s strategy and plans.

Steve, can you describe the underlying strategy and vision behind Intel’s push into home healthcare?

We know people want to age in place and stay connected to family and healthcare providers. From a people-centric perspective, those are the highest objectives. From a clinical perspective, we are looking to define behavioral markers. So, akin to a biomarker, which is a genetic or chemical indication of disease, we are looking for behaviors we can measure and then correlate to detection or onset of disease. So, for example, there have been studies showing that people who have a greater level of cognitive decline also have a rate of walking speed that is significantly more variable than those who have lower rates of cognitive decline. We are trying to figure out if we can measure those.

So far, your work has been limited to real life testing in about 20 or so homes. Do you plan to scale that up?

For Intel proper, those are the numbers. We have an important partnership with the Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU), and they are expanding those numbers. They have one test with upwards of 300 homes. Intel will scale up its numbers, mainly through partnerships like that.

Intel has described these products as cost-savers in the cost of delivering health care. How so?

We know that over time, the number of health care providers is going to be more scarce—especially nurses and caregivers. This technology may be able to make healthcare providers more efficient, and provide conveniences to patients. There are potential cost savings here.

How far are we from seeing these products introduced as commercial products for use in the home?

It’s difficult to say. One reason we need to scale up our work with universities is to accelerate that research and demonstrate the possible positive outcomes.

Does Intel see these products as being paid for through health insurance programs?

That depends on the specifics. If we have a diagnostic tool that helps the doctor do his job, it’s possible the doctor will purchase the products for their own use. If we have something that creates cost efficiencies for certain agencies, it’s possible payers may be reimbursed. But we have to have the clinical findings.

How did Intel get interested in this research?

We have a team of ethnographers. It’s been around a number of years—it’s a well-kept secret that Intel has one of the largest groups of ethnographers in the industry. And part of this started five or six years ago with that team’s work looking at requirements for the coming digital home. Today we understand the digital home to be about entertainment –connectivity with movies and so forth–but at the time we didn’t know what the concept meant. So we were poking on it. And what we heard from consumers was, ‘If you can do this with our entertainment media, can you also connect me to my mom? I need to be connected to her.’ We saw that we could use some of these connective technologies to provide a means for informal caregiving and healthcare. That’s the genesis of this research.

What’s the estimated impact on Intel’s business? How large will the home health technology business be, ultimately?

Right now the revenue projections are quite small but we know this demographic is growing. This is a business opportunity as well as an opportunity to positively impact the lives of people. With that in mind, the commitment is there from the company to see where this goes and push it forward.