QUESTIONS FOR Stewart Hardie
A CDL Recovery alumnus describes how technology can positively impact quality of life for seniors.
For those who aren’t familiar with Tenera Care, please describe what your product does.
What we initially intended our Tenerawear bracelet to do and what it does now are two different things. We designed the bracelet to serve as an automated call for assistance, so residents of assisted-living facilities didn’t have to push a button on the wall or pull a cord to ask for help. The software system attached to the bracelet would intuitively understand that the individual was in a position where they needed help, and it would alert the nursing staff. A call for assistance might go out, for instance, if someone was having trouble getting out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the washroom.
We created a product that achieved this goal; but we quickly realized that we were generating some very powerful data that gave a clear picture of the residents’ behaviours — and their quality of life. By knowing where people were at all times, for instance, we knew how much time they were spending interacting with others and moving around. The data also provided insights into the number of washroom visits per day, sleep patterns, and how many steps a resident was taking. In addition to knowing these things, we could also see changes in these trends, which could be addressed immediately. The bracelet automatically tells us, for example, if someone is suddenly sleeping for six hours more than usual each day, which could indicate that something is up. So that is what we ended up with: A device that can not only be used as an automated call for assistance, but also as a way to monitor quality of life for a vulnerable segment of our society.
Can you describe your ‘Eureka’ moment?
This all started from my own personal experience. I have had relatives in long-term care facilities who have faced difficulties, so my initial thinking was, ‘When my grandmother gets out of bed, I want the staff to know about it’. That initial idea was cool, but the eureka moment came when I realized that, by collecting 86,000 data points each day on these residents; we could understand so much about them.
When people move into a nursing home, they don’t always have the cognitive ability to say, ‘I’m not feeling right
today’. The opportunity to have a system in place that tracks movement and alerts staff to adjust care protocols appropriately — was the first big eureka moment for me.
I had a second eureka moment last March. I was in the U.S. when the pandemic broke out, and we were politely asked to return to Canada. On the plane home, we were designing aspects of the software to address resident safety. Due to their cognitive situation, some residents get agitated very easily, and there is actually a lot of hostile activity in these homes. Recognizing the onset of these situations by tracking contact between residents was one of the features we designed. The accuracy of our system was within six inches in three dimensions around the resident.
On that plane ride home I suddenly realized: Wow, we literally have the best contact-tracing mechanism in the world here. All we would have to do was change the default on the system to ‘within two meters’, and we could track social distancing.
Talk a bit more about the struggles faced by this vulnerable group of consumers.
If you live in an assisted living facility, the protocols are pretty much the same across the country: When you need assistance, you have to pull a cord in the bathroom or push a button located at the bedside. Sometimes, there is a call unit on the wall by the door. But if you think about it, the time of need is usually not when you’re in bed or walking around — it’s when you’re lying on the floor and can’t reach any of these tools. That’s what really motivated us, initially. It took five years to develop the bracelet, and of course, I didn’t do it alone. I have an amazing team: There are 15 of us, mostly really smart engineers. I’m just the guy who brought them all together.
Describe how you became involved with the Creative Destruction Lab at the Rotman School.
After I had that second eureka moment coming back from the U.S., I had another realization, which was that no one was going to have access to long-term care facilities across North America for some time. Sure enough, when we landed in Halifax, everything had been shut down. I turned to my team and said, ‘Look, we’re going to have at least three months before we can do anything in these facilities. So let’s repurpose our offering to address the battle with
COVID-19’.
We applied for a number of programs, and one that accepted us was CDL Recovery. The CDL team was extremely helpful and knowledgeable. We were being approached by a lot of different industries that needed the ability to contact trace. What happened in long-term care was, if a staff member came in with COVID, they would send everyone home to quarantine, regardless. But that left facilities without enough human resources.
The same thing was happening in other industries. Tyson Foods approached us because they were having that same problem at their meat packaging plants in the U.S. and Alberta. They were interested because our tools could tell them exactly who needed to be quarantined, and they could keep the remainder of their staff at work.
The calls kept coming in: We heard from the Port of Halifax; a seafood processing plant in Scotland; and some companies from the oil industry in Texas. We were getting dragged all over the place. I talked it out with the CDL team about it, and they felt strongly that we should remain focused — and not just pivot for all the ‘shiny little objects’ that were popping up in front of us.
We knew we had a product that could really make a difference for long-term care, and that this was an area that sorely needed attention. Our product is going to be influential in other industries as well, but right now, we are focusing on the sector that needs it the most and the people who are suffering the most.
But wait! Maybe you could have become the Apple of contact tracing!
We might still, who knows. The way I look at it is, we didn’t have the resources to tackle all kinds of different industries. What we were built for, originally, was to enhance the quality of life for our older population. The team we’ve built is very much focused on doing the right thing. We’re not here to line our pockets; we’re here to make a difference.
Last fall I was visiting with one of our customers — a resident who was in her mid-90s or older. I asked her, “How do you feel about wearing the Tenera bracelet”? Her answer was so powerful: “I don’t feel afraid anymore”. I asked what she meant, and she said, “I was always afraid of being left alone and forgotten; but now I know someone is always watching me.” That was so moving. She was sitting in a wheelchair
We quickly realized that we were generating some very powerful data.
flipped it up in the air; and said, “This thing is totally useless. I could never find it when I needed it!”
Do you have plans to scale globally?
Yes. We’re working across Canada right now, with some projects underway in Ontario, and we’ve started to work with the Manitoba Government. Travel restrictions make things difficult, but we are in talks with an organization in Chicago and another one in Arkansas. We’ve had interest from facilities in Tennessee and Mississippi, and from a company in Japan. We’re hoping to get to all of these places as quickly as possible, but I don’t expect it will be until late 2021. We’re working closely with Global Affairs, and they have been extremely helpful.
It is widely recognized that no company —— even one with a product as great as yours —— can stop innovating. How are you approaching that?
It’s funny, because when we started out, we went through a bunch of iterations and I used some third parties for our hardware, but we eventually got to the point where we wanted to do it all ourselves. So I hired a bunch of engineers, including three young graduates out of the University of Waterloo. Unprompted, they said to me when they started: ‘We don’t ever want to stop making things better. We’ll do all the grunt work in the beginning, but once we get to a certain point, we want to be able to conduct research and innovate’. So we have a dedicated team that does all the day to day stuff, and we also have this team of original employees who do nothing but focus on innovation.
One of the exciting things they’re working on is offering our positioning technologies in three dimensions. This means we’ll be able to tell staff that someone is lying on the floor, and exactly where they are at that moment. We are also working on understanding balance. By watching a person’s movements in three dimensions, you can understand their balance issues and any changes to that. Balance is a huge indicator of negative events for seniors, so this will be very significant. We hope to be able to predict falls very accurately in the near future.
The amazing thing is, we will be able to get all of this information out of a bracelet whose batteries last for at least a year, so people don’t have to charge it every night or take it off. They can even wear it in the shower.
As a leader and innovator, what is one critical lesson that this pandemic has taught you?
Above all, stay focused, and keep your team focused. I mentioned all the opportunities we were offered last year. I only told one or two people about it because it would have been too easy to get distracted. Keeping everyone focused on the end goal amidst all the uncertainty was critical.
Second, being able to understand what we could get done quickly and effectively was important. At a time like this, it’s not about what you can build up in two or three years, it’s about what you can do right now. As I mentioned, we flipped our tracking around quickly to a default of two metres, to meet the new social distancing requirements. Recognizing what we could change quickly and what would be useful in the short-term — these were big lessons that we learned together as a team.
Basically, you’re using technology to bring more humanity into people’s lives. Is this what the future looks like?
It is. My grandmother always used to say, “It’s not about longevity, it’s about quality of life”. She didn’t want to be on a dialysis machine every day. She would often say to me, “This isn’t right”. My hope is that we can make a difference for people like her, by understanding when changes are occurring. That way, interventions can take place before it’s too late and quality of life can be extended.
We’re not here to line our pockets; we’re here to make a difference.