When Scott Carpenter’s wife Anne Maple was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2014, he set out to find assistance as caregiving needs increased.
He found that the technology on the market wasn’t great: most of it was clunky, single-purpose or not very supportive for the caregivers.
A professor at Carleton College, Carpenter previously ran a tech company for about a decade. His son, Paul, is a software engineer with a specialty in iOS and watchOS. The duo founded BoundaryCare in 2019 to solve the issue and began development in the following year.
Unfortunately, their wife and mother’s disease had advanced too far by that time. She died earlier this year.
“I think it is true of many people working in this area, especially if they’re doing it as a startup, you have to have some strong personal motivation,” Scott Carpenter said.
St. Paul-based BoundaryCare provides a variety of services that can benefit elderly people and those with intellectual or developmental disabilities: location tracking, health tracking, fall prevention and more. It connects directly to an Apple Watch (an Android version is expected at the end of the third quarter of this year), so it doesn’t come with the stigma that can sometimes be associated with similar tracking products on the market.
“The simple idea of using the Apple Watch, which actually has social status instead of social stigma, is a big change. It means that people will actually wear it,” Carpenter said. It also means a variety of biometrics can be tracked, which could then help solve what led to a fall or give updates on a person’s general wellbeing.
Caregivers can then gather the info from whatever device they have. Because caregiving is often a team effort, Carpenter said BoundaryCare can also allow different caregivers to go on-duty or off-duty and get alerts only at certain times.
The initial goal was to support people with dementia or aging-in-place, but they’ve since stepped into the IDD world too, which is for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
BoundaryCare currently has about 1,000 users. The team signed an agreement last month with Inclusa, a managed care organization that serves more than 30,000 people in Wisconsin, that is sure to expand the userbase. They also pulled $800,000 from angel investors last year, which will help with ramping up for broader distribution and with seeking clarity on the best market fit.
They got a contract with I Am Boundless, a well-known organization in Ohio that works with people with intellectual and development disabilities.
“As we get that sort of visibility, and other people see the kinds of organizations that we're already working with, we expect to soon have the very desirable problem of not being able to keep up,” Carpenter said.
