An AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, CareYaya Health Technologies is a tech startup and applied research lab focused on enhancing home healthcare delivery. Its flagship product is a technology platform that lets people quickly book experienced caregivers, all of whom are students in the healthcare field. CareYaya is also launching new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to help people better manage caregiving, aging and serious illness.
To learn more, we spoke with CEO Neal Shah, who described the company’s mission, innovations and the unique benefits CareYaya’s caregivers have to offer.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What is CareYaya all about?
We’re a social enterprise and tech startup doing a lot of innovation around aging care. We’re like an Uber for caregiving — families who need help with eldercare can go online to our platform and, in less than two minutes, book a caregiver for the dates and times they need.
CareYaya is somewhere between 30% and 50% less expensive than what the traditional home care industry charges, so it’s an affordable program for families. We’re also unique in that we charge no fees — all the money goes to the caregivers themselves.
Who are the caregivers you hire?
We’ve unlocked a unique workforce: All our caregivers are college students who are aspiring to careers in healthcare, so they’re in nursing, pre-med and similar programs. They’re the doctors and nurses of the future. It’s good for them because they get experience working one-on-one with older adults in their community in a flexible way, because they can’t participate in the care economy full time. And because all the money goes to them, it’s a great way to earn money.
We started locally with around 50 students, then grew across our state to 1,000 students. Then, within the last year, we went viral at campuses all across the country, and we now have more than 18,000 students from more than 30 universities.
It seems like that kind of growth can unlock some interesting opportunities.
This workforce expansion has allowed us to begin shifting our focus to the next phase for CareYaya. We have this workforce of well-educated, digital-native young people, so we’re working on ways that they can bring rapidly developing tech innovations into the homes of older adults to improve care.
For example, we’re developing an AI-powered dementia caregiver training platform, to inform both the student and family caregivers on best practices for dementia caregiving. Currently, caregiver training can involve watching dozens of hours of videos, which most people don’t have the time for. Our AI solution is a quick way to personalize training, based on how much they already know and based on the person they’re actually caring for. It takes the approach of: What are the next three things the caregiver needs to learn? And it comes in bite-sized modules.
So the students have a unique opportunity to introduce new tech to families.
There is a lot of great technology being developed in the AgeTech space, but there’s a gap. You can build the coolest thing ever, but an 84-year-old with Alzheimer’s probably won’t use it, and their grown children with busy lives may not have the time to engage with it. But a college student can become the avenue for bringing those technologies into the home. So not only are they providing companionship and safety, they can be doing other things such as diagnostic and preventative care to reduce the risks of hospitalizations or ER visits.
For another example, we’re working on a method of using a smartphone or tablet to track the micro-oscillations in people’s pupils, which can be used to diagnose cognitive decline. That’s important because if the person’s family is not aware that they are in decline, that can result in the person being at higher risk of falling, leaving the stove on or getting into an accident. But the tech-savvy student caregiver can bring that tech into the home as part of their caregiving routine.
What inspired you to found the company?
Some years ago, my mom took a sabbatical from work to become the caregiver for my grandfather. What was supposed to be a few months turned into years, and I observed the emotional toll it took on her, and she never returned to work. Later, my wife was diagnosed with cancer, and I made the difficult and emotional decision to leave my career to become her full-time caregiver and experienced that stress myself.
After years of going to hospitals and seeing so many other caregivers experience the same difficulties, I realized this was going to become a major crisis in America — and that it represented an opportunity to build something that can have enormous social impact. So I became obsessed with this mission.
Beyond caregiving, there’s a social component that’s built through CareYaya — the No. 1 thing that families tell us is that the student caregivers start to feel like grandkids to the person receiving care, and they actively look forward to when that person comes again. Our mission is to change the traditional caregiving experience from something that may be just about safety, into something that’s proactive and that the family feels is better than they might be able to provide themselves.
What’s in store for CareYaya?
I’m driven by social impact, and my personal vision is to build the biggest company in the caregiving space without charging the consumers anything. I think there’s an elegant way to do that by building at scale, while still making sure caregivers are getting paid fair wages. So that’s our dream: to build the biggest care company in this sector and make a huge social impact and never charge people. If anyone is interested in getting in touch to help with our mission, they can reach me at LinkedIn.
You can find out more about CareYaya at their website.
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