Many observers are broadly familiar with the numbers associated with the market for aged care products and services.

In short, it’s about to get a whole lot bigger.

The shift will take place across most advanced economies as the post-World War II baby boomer generations move into their retirement years.

And along with that change, many companies and investors are looking for opportunities to build or invest in ideas which serve that market.

One such product is Intelicare — a software-as-a-service (SaaS) monitoring solution that offers peace of mind for seniors and their families.

The Perth-based company started product development in 2016 with a $500,000 grant from the WA Country Health Services, and began making its first commercial sales earlier this year.

Founder and CEO Mike Tappenden and his team are now aiming to raise up to $5 million from private investors to scale up and grow market share.

22,000 hours

Intelicare’s product is comprised of a hardware pack which sets out a group of monitoring sensors in a home.

Resident patterns are tracked and the data is sent to an app that provides round-the-clock information and access for friends, family and carers.

The app sends notifications if it notices something is amiss, urgent alerts via the app or SMS and a touch-screen communication function.

One aim of the product is to help keep seniors in their home longer and help ease the inevitable burden on government resources. And it’s a niche that many competitors are looking to provide solutions for.

“We see some competitors offering alternative products, but a lot have taken shortcuts which leave them too reliant on external hardware providers,” Tappenden told Stockhead.

“All the foundation stuff we’ve built ourselves, and we’ve built it to the enterprise standards that you’d expect for a secure and scalable product.”

“There’s about 22,000 hours of work that’s gone into Intelicare’s development, and it’s very hard to replicate that.”

Peace of mind

Tappenden says Intelicare is designed to address three core problems.

“The first is that we’ve really focused on senior citizens and their dignity and safety in the home. That’s very ingrained in the culture of our employees – they’re all focused on that as the primary outcome.”

“The system is designed to be unobtrusive so people don’t have to change their routines, they don’t have to wear anything. They can just go about their daily lives.”

The second key benefit is peace of mind — for both families and carers — which in turn helps to foster healthier relationships.

“Before this technology, families didn’t have that visibility so they tend to have kneejerk reactions to events, which drives them to push their parents into higher levels of care,” he explained.

“So the relationship between children and parents improves, because the children don’t worry as much and parents don’t feel like a burden.”

And lastly, Tappenden say the product can provide a commercial solution which eases the financial burden on governments and individual finances.

Expansion plans

The up-front cost of each Intelicare unit is $750, at a cost of goods valued at $400 which leaves a gross profit margin of around 50 per cent.

Users then pay for the ongoing monitoring service on a subscription basis at a monthly cost of $45.

Tappenden says the company is receiving interest from interstate markets, and forecasts the company will sell more than 1,000 units in the 2019 financial year.

Having raised around $1.2 million from a mix of government grants and early financing arounds, Intelicare is now looking to tap investors for a further $5 million to scale up. The capital raising is being managed by Discovery Capital Partners.

“We’ve allocated some capital to ongoing product R&D and data analytics so that what we’ve built it’s future proof from the perspective of — say Apple releases an improvement to its Apple Watch, we’ll can just add that as part of our service,” he said.

The company also plans to hire more staff to work under the business development manager, ramp up its marketing efforts and employ staff for services and logistics management.

And Tappenden says a significant chunk of capital will go towards boosting inventory levels as sales start to grow.

“As we sell more units we’ll need more stock, and a large chunk of that money is allocated to ensuring we have appropriate capital to purchase stock in advance of the orders,” Tappenden said.

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