As Marlo Vernon’s grandmother got older, her family began wondering how best they could keep an eye on her.
She was living alone, and Vernon said her family was wary of potential accidents.
So, the 23-year-old Lafayette native began to brainstorm with her father Todd, an established local entrepreneur that most recently was the founder and CEO of Boulder-based VictorOps.
“How can we keep an eye on her? There was no way she would let us put a camera in her house or wear LifeAlert,” Vernon said. “We came up with this idea of monitoring water use.”
As Vernon was completing her senior year at CU Boulder, she began to dive deeper into this idea. By monitoring water usage, she had come across a non-intrusive way for people to keep tabs on older adults.
After graduating last spring, Vernon took the project full-time and launched CarePenguin.
With the startup’s combination of sensor hardware and partner application, users can monitor human behavior by tracking water usage. Once the temperature sensor is placed on the hot water pipe, it monitors each time the temperature spikes and sends an update to the application.
“We found that the average senior citizen uses water about seven times a day, it’s a great proxy for human behavior,” Vernon said.
The company is wrapping up beta testing of the product and has recently launched on the app store. In the near future, CarePenguin will make its sensor available for purchase for $40 and a subscription for $8.99 a month for monitoring.
In addition to monitoring activity, users of CarePenguin can set up activity zones when they expect water usage. If the sensor isn’t activated during those times, the user is alerted on the application.
“This has given us peace of mind and can do the same for many others,” Vernon said.
As it prepares to launch, CarePenguin is eyeing an outside funding round in the future that is targeted at helping to grow the company’s staff and offerings.
Ultimately, Vernon said she wants CarePenguin to have a suite of non-invasive monitoring options for older adults.
“In the end we want to be a sensor fusion platform specifically for remote monitoring of elderly people living independently,” she said.
