Independa Unveils Integrated App to Link the Independent Elderly with Care-Givers

A little more than two years after Kian Saneii founded Independa, the San Diego wireless health startup says it is making its integrated telecare app, Angela, available Friday for beta testing.

The program, which will be generally available in September, provides a very simple interface that enables the elderly to send and receive e-mail, download photos, and to use Skype, Facebook, calendars, and other web services with no computer skills required. Independa plans to install its preconfigured software-as-a-service on an off-the-shelf touch-screen tablet. Elderly users will not need to know how to use a general-purpose computer, navigate with a mouse or type on a keypad.

“It’s super simple, with just one-touch access to all these things,” Saneii told me during a personal demo last week. “They don’t have to remember passwords or how to get updates.” He’s planning to demonstrate the technology again today at Connections: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase in Santa Clara, CA.

After raising some seed-stage funding last year, Saneii says he has been meeting recently with venture capital partners to raise additional funding for Independa as the startup expands its product offering. The company launched its first offering, the Independa “Smart Reminders” service almost seven months ago, and moved into San Diego’s no-overhead EvoNexus incubator in October. Smart Reminders also is a Web-based platform that combines apps for calendaring, medication reminders, and “life stories” into a browser-based system managed by caregivers.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.