The Safe Seniors Story

IN CONVERSATION WITH: Ayush Agrawal, Co-founder, Seniority

Can you tell us about SafeSeniors, right from its inception to now?

Seniority is the RPG Group’s youngest startup that focuses on serving senior citizens. With the ongoing pandemic, we felt that it was important for us to do something on this front. People above the age of 60 are a lot more vulnerable to the virus, and have a higher probability of catching it.

Seniority, in partnership with RPG Life Sciences, created SafeSeniors, the predictive analysis tool designed to primarily help in early identification of Covid-19 risk amongst the elderly, with its technology backed by Zensar. The tool was developed in consultation with leading experts in the areas of infectious diseases, community medicine, clinical pharmacology and Covid-19 management. The way the algorithm has been designed, the tool can preempt the risk by almost a day or two, provided the inputs are updated and the risk is tracked daily. The fact that one can predict something untowardly even a day in advance can be the difference between life and death.

Keeping in mind the demographics of the target audience, are they digitally savvy to use SafeSeniors without any hiccups?

Senior citizens are a lot more technology savvy than we give them credit for. You will find them everywhere today, from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the most common one being WhatsApp. Even on the company’s website, Seniority.in, more than 30% of the footfall consists of the elderly. Basis that, we are anticipating a similar number for SafeSeniors. As far as the flip side of the survey is concerned, the youngsters up the percentages. The seniors who are not tech-savvy are often helped by their children or grandchildren to buy essentials and miscellaneous products online, and we can expect the same population to create profiles for the elder members of their families as well. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the same city or not, one can create multiple profiles for the entire family and be able to view them together in one single dashboard. SafeSeniors is fairly simple to operate, it’s pretty much a plug-and-play app.

What do you mean when you say that anyone can operate SafeSeniors on behalf of an elderly person from anywhere? Does this also mean that they can use it to monitor their own health?

First of all, let me clarify that this app is for anyone. It is universal in nature. The way the algorithm is made, it isn’t age specific. Even though our target audience has been seniors, the beauty of this is that people from varying age groups can input their data and keep track of the status of their health. When the data is fed, age is a compulsory input, which automatically helps calculate the level of risk. It will also take into consideration the predisposition to certain diseases, genetic patterns, etc. which can vary from person to person, even if they fall in the same age bracket. Why we are focused on seniors is because they fall in the high-risk category, especially the ones who are winging it by themselves on a daily basis during the lockdown.

For those seniors who are not savvy enough to be able to put forth their data points digitally, the younger population can take charge on their behalf. All they need to do is to stay in touch with them on a daily basis and ask them that out of the 14 vitals and 8-10 alarming symptoms, which are the ones that stand out of the ordinary. It takes about an average of 30 seconds to run through the questionnaire and a few minutes to update the same on the app, following which they can keep a track of the results on the app, as it tabulates and discloses the risk levels.

Once SafeSeniors tags someone as a high-risk patient, what’s the next step for them?

The very first step would be to immediately call the Covid-19 helpline number set up by the Government of India. There are multiple helplines by various national as well as state government bodies provided in the app. The numbers have been placed in a very handy layout alongside relevant email IDs as well.

We are also in talks with various healthcare departments, government bodies, etc. for a sound backend integration in order to enable a quicker access to relevant government support. They are very keen on partnering with us because this is another way for them to gain faster access to data, which is not just relevant, but also accurate. They need the data as much as we do, so that they can utilise their healthcare resources more efficiently, thereby getting help to the end user a lot faster.

Post Covid-19, what is in the pipeline for this app?

With Zensar and RPG Life Sciences on our side, ushering in the support of the IT and the medical world, we are working towards making the algorithm more and more robust. Age-related diseases are fairly rampant in nature, and we envisage SafeSeniors to become a medium that can serve to fulfil them at a holistic level. With constant innovation, digitalisation and most importantly, opening our minds to newer possibilities, we can make this happen.