In recent years the concept of smart homes and home health technologies has been widely spread among manufacturing industries. However, the dream of technology providing home healthcare has not become a reality for several reasons such as:
• Consumers cannot afford or are unwilling to spend as much on health technology as hospitals so the devices must be very inexpensive,
• There are no clinical engineering departments in peoples’ homes so installation and maintenance requirements must be minimal,
• Individual devices tend to produce lots of false alarms and caregivers do not have the time to sort through the noise,
• Developers and startup companies fail to commercialize their inventions because they cannot afford to conduct large enough trials to apply machine learning to improve performance and they cannot achieve sufficient sales quickly enough to remain viable at prices consumers can afford.
The PATH program provides a network that creates a pathway for rapid testing and commercialization of new home health products. The network includes sites in Ottawa, Toronto, Waterloo, Edmonton, and Kelowna.
