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Mana Care - Enabling Digital Inclusion for Elderly and Cognitively Disabled

Quick Facts

Company

Mana Care
www.manacare.se

Customer Profile

Mana Care is a telecare startup founded by Jeff DeAngelis and Anders Reisch, both with extensive experience. Anders, inspired by a personal experience, saw the need for a simple communication platform for seniors facing cognitive difficulties or struggling with complex digital environments. They noticed the market lacked an affordable, quality product in this area. Meanwhile, Jeff was innovating in IoT-based solutions to offer significant advantages to businesses and services needing skilled workers. In December 2022, during a catch-up conversation, the two former colleagues conceived the idea for Måna Care…and the rest is history.

Objectives

Inspire Digital Inclusion among the Elderly, Cognitively Challenged, and Intellectually Disabled to live independent lives.

Results

After 7 months of development and close collaboration with healthcare customers, the first Mana Care devices are available for pilot testing on 3 continents in the USA, Sweden and India.

Semtech Products & Services
  • AirVantage® Smart Connectivity
  • Connectivity Management Platform

Introduction

Technology often overlooks the unique challenges faced by the elderly and cognitively disabled communities. Recognizing this gap, Mana Care set out to develop intuitive, reliable telecare devices to promote digital inclusion for these underserved groups. Their partnership with Semtech leverages AirVantage Smart Connectivity services, resulting in a game-changing telecare solution that is both accessible and empowering.

Mana, a Swedish word meaning “to care”, is an innovative telecare device that provides voice/video communication, voice assistance and health monitoring. Aimed at the elderly and people with cognitive disabilities, Mana emphasizes simplicity and offers essential applications for ease of use. Its intuitive design allows seniors to easily make voice calls, access daily schedules, and enjoy digital entertainment using natural language. A built-in sensor also allows for convenient basic health checks. Mana serves as a seamless medium for caregivers, family members and friends to maintain a non-intrusive connection with their elderly loved ones.

Challenge

A key challenge for Mana Care was to design a solution that would be easy for elderly users to use right out of the box. This meant that the devices needed to instantly connect to an available cellular network without a complicated setup process. The elderly user’s family can then choose to connect the device to a local Wi-Fi network. As requested by several caregiver customers, Mana Care has also built in automatic failover cellular connectivity to maintain service in the event of a Wi-Fi outage.

As a burgeoning startup operating across three continents, Mana Care sought to develop a global product featuring uniform hardware and software design. This strategy aimed at streamlining logistics and reducing associated costs.

Centralized-Device-Management

Semtech’s AirVantage® Smart Connectivity service solves our clients’ need to achieve ‘instant on and attach performance’ by seamlessly connecting Måna® to the best regional cellular networks automatically upon platform plug-in… After reviewing many global IoT Data providers, we selected Semtech because of their comprehensive global operator partners network, excellent technical and sales support, and belief in Måna‘s vision and potential.

Jeff DeAngelis, CEO, and
Anders Reisch, Chairman, Mana Care AB

Solution

Using Semtech’s AirVantage® Smart Connectivity service and the latest generative AI technology, Mana Care has effectively realized its vision.

Smart Connectivity enables Mana Care to distribute their telecare devices to customers on three continents, providing consistent functionality through the following features:

  • Automatic network connection upon activation for a plug-and-play user experience
  • Network resiliency that allows for uninterrupted service by seamlessly switching to other available networks during network disruptions
  • Global SIM with access to more than 600 partner networks in 190 countries and territories
  • Comprehensive management portal for provisioning and monitoring data usage on all SIMs deployed globally
  • Flexible pricing and the ability to pool data usage across devices in specific regions

Benefits

Mana Care’s adoption of the AirVantage Smart Connectivity service has proven beneficial in the following ways:

  • Unmatched service availability: Mana meets stringent requirements with reliable, always-on service for mission-critical senior communications.
  • Rapid time to market: Achieved an outstanding rollout of the first global product from concept to production in just 7 months.
  • Streamlined Operations: Simplified global logistics and operations with a single product reference for all their markets worldwide.
  • Cost-Effective Scaling: Enabled Mana Care to gain immediate visibility into their global deployment through the management platform and effectively manage operational costs through adaptive data usage plans.

For more information on Semtech solution visit:
https://www.sierrawireless.com/iot-services/smart-connectivity/

Worldwide icon

Your pricing and data plan flexibility was important to us, that’s a big differentiator… For our application, the data usage can vary a lot from one device to another… We want to have a baseline service plan and to pool the data usage across all the devices connected in a region. Most of the other connectivity service providers we talked to didn’t offer us that flexibility, even though they are global.

Jeff DeAngelis
CEO and Co-founder of Mana Care

Related Products

Tagged Industries
Healthcare Other
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Client

Mana Care

Location

United States
Sweden
India

Markets

Telecare, Elderly Care, Digital Inclusion

Products & Service​

AirVantage Smart Connectivity,
Connectivity management platform

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