The elderly care crisis is a ticking time bomb. Our startup Birdie is tackling it.
When I was younger, I used to visit my grandfather in a care home. He had Parkinson’s disease and when my grandmother died suddenly, my family decided that a care home was the best place for him. Despite what we thought, it didn’t help, and his health began to decline rapidly. He hated being there, I hated seeing him so confused and disoriented, lonely and unhappy, and so I too began to hate going there, avoiding it as much as possible. I realised that I, just like the rest of society, was struggling with ageing.
Sixteen years later as I’m sitting with a group of friends, all tech entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals, we began to ask the question; how can technology serve a social purpose? That’s when it hit me that we could change the way our society sees, and manages, an aging generation.
