Wednesday 09/17/2025
Took the standard walk in the morning, cleverly timing it so that I could have coffee at Verve and get to CVS at 9:45 on the dot, for my Covid shot appointment. Later CVS sent my vaccine record as they knew it. Interesting that I have had 2 Covid shots per year, for the past 4 years. I am sudden death for any virus silly enough to try to infect me.
There has been a custom of a 1pm zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers on the Wednesday after the sale, for some time now. So at 1pm I clicked the old zoom link and there was no meeting. The new volunteer coordinator didn’t want to have a meeting, but apparently didn’t think to announce that. Oh well.
At 2 I joined a meeting that Bert had set up, with a representative of a German company that has developed an AI-based system for evaluating people for the likelihood they will have a fall. Falls are very common among us old farts, which I only came to realize after moving here. It seems like you hear about somebody having a fall every month at least. Sometimes it only results in bruises or less; sometimes it breaks a bone; sometimes it starts them on a decline that ends in assisted living status or worse.
This outfit’s test involves shooting cell phone video of a person as they stand up from a chair, take 3 steps, turn around, three steps back to the chair, sit down. The video uploads to the cloud and is examined by their AI. Plus there is a lengthy questionnaire about health related subjects. The output is a percentage score, likelihood that the person will have a fall in the next six months. The idea is that a physical therapist can use this to find people to work with on exercises for balance etc. They have numbers to show effectiveness in reducing fall frequency in a retirement home.
There is a subscription fee for this service. So the question we couldn’t answer was, how would Channing House make a business case to justify this on-going fee? How do you quantify the cost of falls, or the benefit of reducing the number of falls? Bert is going to work on that with our staff.
After supper, Stew had asked me to run some the video and sound for his group to practice their dance routine for the song “One” from “A Chorus Line”. So I went down and ran the video over and over while they practiced.
Codgerville 