A growing need for PERS monitoring and other home healthcare services presents unique opportunities for security dealers willing to get to know this distinctive market.
The fact is, we’re not getting any younger. As a nation, we are living longer and the largest segment of the population — the baby boomers — is hitting retirement age. In the United States, the age 65 and over demographic is the fastest growing segment of the population, and of that group the fastest growing segment is over age 85, says Ken Gross, president and founder of Medical Alert Monitoring Association (MAMA) and president of Broomall, Pa.-based Connect America. Not surprisingly, more and more people, either the seniors themselves or their adult children, are interested in personal emergency response systems (PERS). Gross adds that people are staying in their homes longer, by choice or the inability to sell their homes in the weak real estate market, and because of the limited availability of beds in hospitals and other facilities.
“Most of the major PERS companies (companies that are selling thousands of units a month) are growing at double digit rates,” says Mark Ingram, president of Tel Aviv, Israel-based manufacturer Visonic Technologies. “We’ve only started getting into the baby-boomer generation. We’ve got millions and millions who are going to need it.’”