Three in four Americans over 50 say they want to stay in their own home as they age. Nearly half of the same group expect they will have to move anyway. HomeSight, Vantiva’s connected care platform, was built to close that gap. Jim Conti, Vantiva’s VP of Sales for Diversification, explains what home care agencies mean by “stages of care”, and how HomeSight fits into each.
What is home care, and what do agencies mean when they talk about stages of care?
Home care is professional help that comes to a person’s house, rather than the person moving to a facility. An agency sends a caregiver for scheduled hours to help with whatever the person needs, whether that is meals, medication, bathing, or getting around safely. Families pay by the hour, and the hours increase as the person’s needs grow.
Because those needs change over time, agencies describe them in stages. The stages track how much care comes into the house and fall into three broad buckets.
The first is early care. The person lives at home and manages their own day. They may still drive, cook, and handle their own medication, and no caregiver visits routinely. They see themselves as fully independent, though they or the people around them may have begun to notice small changes. Often, a family member spots them during a visit. Mail piling up unopened on the table, a pan with a scorch mark, or a fall that gets mentioned in passing. Two or three of those together are enough to start a family thinking about how to care for this person in the stages ahead. That’s when many families make their first call to a care agency to learn what help exists, often years before any in-home caregiving is needed.
The second is blended care. A caregiver comes for a few scheduled hours each week, and between visits the agency stays in touch remotely through what we call wellness checks.
After that come the later stages. Hours increase, sometimes to daily visits, sometimes to round-the-clock care, and at the end of life, hospice. Agencies define these later stages a little differently, but the direction is the same.
Running alongside all of that is a second path: moving out of the house. Independent living communities, then assisted living, then full nursing care.
So what is HomeSight, and where does it fit into those stages?
HomeSight is a service that families get through their home care agency or care community for someone who wants to stay in their own home, keep their independence, and stay connected to the people looking after them.
It arrives as a small box with a built-in camera, which we call the Wellness Hub, and it connects to the television. Once it is plugged in, family members and caregivers can make a video call to it. The call appears on the TV screen, the person accepts it with the remote, and when it ends, the TV returns to what it was doing. Reminders for medication, appointments, and other tasks can be set to appear on the screen at fixed times.
Family members manage all of this through a mobile app, and the care agency through a web portal. The person at home uses only their TV and remote.
The Wellness Hub stays central as the person’s needs grow. Other services are added to meet them where they are, whether that is health readings taken at home, sensors that follow their daily routine, or a caregiver checking in between visits.
During early care, HomeSight provides connection. It links the person to their family and, when needed, to their medical caregivers through the television. That is a unique offer for an agency at this stage, when greater intervention would be unwelcome and unnecessary. The usual answer to a family who calls in for help or advice at this stage has been, call me back when you’re ready. Now the agency can say, I have something for you today, and the relationship starts on trust rather than on need. It also addresses isolation, which is common at this stage and easy to overlook.
During blended care, the same hub becomes the way the caregiver checks in between scheduled visits, including health readings the person takes at home.
In later stages, when visits may happen daily, sensors around the house let the family and care team see whether the person’s routine looks the way it did last month, and add safety, from fall detection to kitchen alerts.
When someone moves into a community, HomeSight can go with them. The family still calls on Sunday. The person still joins the book club, the tai chi session, or the church service they used to attend in person, and those connections are theirs, chosen by them, rather than whatever is on the activity board that week. On the facility’s side, the same platform helps staff keep an eye on residents between rounds.
So the tool stays the same across the whole path. At the beginning, it gives a person more years at home. Later, it gives them a say in who they see and what they do, wherever they live.
Someone at that first stage likely still sees themselves as independent and wholly capable. How does a system like this land with them, rather than feeling like something the family imposed?
By starting with something they actually want. What goes in the house at early care is the hub and nothing else. It carries connection, not readings, sensors, or anything being measured for caretakers. For the individual living with HomeSight, it is the grandkids calling on Sunday and showing pictures from the latest school trip on her TV, and nothing about being checked up on. During early care, HomeSight is used for one thing, which is connection. The hub also carries the part of life that shrinks first when someone stops driving or whose social life begins to change with time. A church service for a person who attended every week and can no longer get there. Bingo, a book club, tai chi, a group they join from their favorite armchair. Adapted exercise courses to keep active. Travel programming, so someone who used to go places can spend an afternoon in Japan. Family and caregivers can also watch alongside them, so it becomes something shared.
Much of what HomeSight does is let a doctor or caregiver follow a person without leaving the house. What does that look like for the person?
Say your doctor wants a blood pressure reading twice a day for a month to check whether a new medication is working. Ordinarily, that means the person writes numbers in a notebook, or a caregiver drives out to take the reading.
With HomeSight, a reminder to measure your blood pressure pops up on the TV. The person picks up the blood pressure cuff supplied by the agency and takes the reading the same way they would anywhere. The cuff sends the result to the hub over Bluetooth. The hub records it and sends it to the cloud, where it is stored securely. Weight works the same way with a scale, and blood oxygen with a small clip on the finger. Nobody writes anything down or phones anything in.
The doctor then sees thirty days of readings, twice a day, instead of the one number taken in the office. They can see if the medication or diet is working, or if something needs to change. On the caregiver side, nobody drives two hours to take a blood pressure reading. Very often the family is the caregiver, so that drive could easily be an out-of-the-way stop on the way home after a long day of work.
What about the days when no caregiver is scheduled?
Very often the family is the second caregiver. A son drives out on Tuesday to check that his mother took her pills, drives back, and does it again on Thursday. That is his week, on top of his job. Or nobody goes, and everyone waits until Friday to find out how the week went.
With the hub, the agency caregiver can appear on TV on the scheduled days and check that all is well. On other days, the son can look for unusual patterns and easily check in on the way home from work. The days between visits stop being blank.
HomeSight also offers sensors to be added to the solution. What are they exactly, and what are they doing?
They are small environmental sensors placed around the house. They read light, motion, temperature, and humidity without using cameras, microphones, or anything listening the way a voice assistant does.
They build a pattern of daily life. Mrs. Jones gets up at eight every morning. One week it’s nine, then ten. Now the caregiver can call and ask, “I noticed you’re sleeping later; are you all right? Did you start a new medication?” The point is to catch something before it becomes a problem.
Or take nights. How many times did she get up, and did she turn on the light? If she is walking to the bathroom in the dark, that is a fall waiting to happen. Now it becomes a conversation about a habit, instead of a trip to the hospital.
As needs change, you can add more. Bed and chair sensors that show whether someone is resting or up and about. A toilet flush sensor that can help check any abnormalities that may hint at illness or something like a urinary tract infection. Fall detection, so that a fall gets a speedy response rather than hours or days. Smart plugs can even turn off a stove left on. Every device reports to the same hub, and the family and the care team see everything on one screen.
Who is this for, and what does it change?
It is for the person who wants to stay in their own home and keep their independence, and for the people around them who worry about the idea of them doing so.
Until recently, the tools to make staying home safe were missing, so the answer was a move into a community. Today the national median for assisted living is around $6,200 a month, and in some markets a bed is hard to find at any price. HomeSight, even at its most complete state with every sensor available added on, costs a fraction of what it costs a family to place their loved one in an assisted living community.
This solution ensures they stay easily connected using devices they are already familiar with and delivers the help they need in the order they need it, and no sooner. They keep their home and their routine, instead of being moved somewhere before it is necessary. For families, worry is replaced with information.
When I talk about this solution to those around me, I can easily say nine out of ten people tell me they’ve had someone in their life for whom this would have helped. Almost every day somebody says, “I wish I’d had this for my mom.”