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Milken Institute — Future of Connected Care (2025)

Dunning L, Rossano J. "The Future of Connected Care: Enabling Healthy Longevity and Aging at Home." Milken Institute Future of Aging, May 2025. Samsung-sponsored, consensus-building approach with expert interviews and a December 2024 roundtable.

Key findings used in wiki

Why aging at home is the dominant trajectory

  • 75% of people over 50 express a preference to age at home.
  • Older adults now use technology at rates comparable to younger generations. The average older adult has seven tech devices, 90% own smartphones, and nearly 40% own wearable devices.
  • Only 13% of older adults over age 75 can afford an assisted living facility in their area — so aging at home is both a preference and, for most, a structural necessity.
  • Shortages in the direct care workforce (personal care and home health aides) continue to constrain supportive services in the home, and fewer family caregivers are available to fill gaps.

Connected care as the integrating concept

  • Connected care links activity inside the home with care outside of the home through data sharing and tools for monitoring, communication, and intervention. It spans a continuum from daily-life to health-care technologies.
  • Example categories on that continuum: smart home environment (smart appliances, lighting, video doorbells, security systems); personal status (smartphones, voice assistants, robot companions); personal safety (PERS devices, fall detection, motion sensors, geofencing); personal health (wearables, apps, medication management, hearables); personal medical status (remote patient monitoring, telehealth visits, automated care).
  • Quoting Hon Pak of Samsung, cited in the report: "Connected care in the home must first and foremost connect people. People connect with devices and also through services. This continuum must work in a seamless way."

The report outlines six building blocks for scaling connected care at home:

  1. Characterize wants, needs, and use cases — start from the lived experience of older adults and their caregivers, not from device capabilities.
  2. Taxonomize connected care at home to link solutions — the field lacks a shared vocabulary, which makes interoperability harder.
  3. Generate proof-of-concept, evidence, and validation — explicitly named as a field-level gap.
  4. Develop sustainable payment models — reimbursement is still fragmented and uneven across Medicare, Medicaid, commercial, and employer payers.
  5. Build a digital front door to data and solutions — a single navigable entry point is not yet standard.
  6. Increase awareness, access, and adoption — especially among older adults, caregivers, and clinicians who do not yet use existing tools.

Why it matters for the wiki

  • Provides a 2025, Milken/Samsung-backed demand-side anchor for the aging-at-home story on evidence/market-gap.md: 75% want to age at home, most cannot afford institutional alternatives, and family caregivers are the thin edge keeping it possible.
  • The six building blocks name gaps that GiveCare's design directly addresses — lived-experience use cases, evidence generation under pragmatic conditions, and a caregiver-facing "digital front door" through SMS rather than a fragmented app landscape.
  • Reinforces the positioning claim that caregiver-facing products should be person-connective before they are device-connective — people first, tools second.