televeda

Mayank Mishra is the co-founder and chief product officer at televeda, a former civil attorney and self-taught software developer, he brings experience in live streaming, telemedicine and ed-tech. 

He was selected to participate in the Department of State 2019 GES Summit to conduct deals with international government and private organizations. More recently, he was selected by the Greater Phoenix Economic Council for a trade mission to the UK to meet with the Minister of Loneliness and work with the NHS to combat social isolation. He works closely with urban planners and several Parks & Rec Department’s municipal senior centers across the United States.

We empower civic organizations to alleviate social isolation for the elderly. We do so by powering a “virtual community center” that enables organizations to live-stream online wellness, socialization and educational classes.

With the outbreak of COVID-19, the elderly are hit the hardest. Nursing homes are becoming even greater centers for loneliness and being quarantined with complete shut downs of in-person activities and local senior centers. This forced isolation of seniors at home will only increase and get deadlier in the next 2 years. Unfortunately, with the outbreak this demographic will have limited social opportunities. By leveraging technology, care organizations can develop their own infrastructure to extend programming, socialization, and wellness beyond the four walls of its recreation centers, providing much-needed resources for overwhelmed communities. 

Virtual programming for seniors has shifted from a novelty to necessity, with organizations scrambling to keep up.

Public Health experts have deemed loneliness an epidemic, and on the same hazard level as obesity and smoking. Many seniors cannot afford long term care facilities and for many the only socialization is via their local community center. Even within senior living communities, over 65% are self-reported as suffering from loneliness. Pre-COVID, communities reported 25% of residents as objectively isolated who could not attend in-person activities due to a number of factors that ranged from disabilities, mobility issues, transportation, anxiety, hygiene, weather, exhaustion, and feelings of inadequacy in peer settings. The majority of the staff is overworked, under-paid and lack resources.

Loneliness is a major predictor of functional decline and death. It is a strain on national productivity and health-care systems. Everyday over 10,000 people turn 65 years old. On average, Medicare spent an additional $134 per month, or $1,608 per year, on each of these socially isolated individuals. Extrapolated to the general elder population, that’s an additional $6.7 billion per year in spending. Isolation costs Medicare more each year than arthritis, and just a bit less than high blood pressure (AARP Study, 2017).

Our project live-streams classes to keep seniors positively engaged and foster a sense of community. We empower organizations to use technology and make the community experience more accessible to the most vulnerable.

But virtual activities for seniors are a lot more complex than just creating a Zoom link. Organizations and caregivers rely on us to save time and offer peace of mind. Virtual activities for the vulnerable is a fragmented offering that involves a lot of complex steps. televeda is the only end-to-end turnkey solution that includes scheduling a calendar of classes, device-agnostic and accessible streaming software (1-click, no downloads), live tech support, automated reminder system, custom data reporting, security and privacy moderation. By working with long-term senior care communities and organizations, we are able to provide the service to seniors and those with disabilities for free.

televeda is directly addressing COVID related issues for those who are impacted the most: the elderly. Our target partner is senior housing and municipalities (city recreational centers). After the virus outbreak, we have also started working with nonprofits who are looking after seniors, infirm and the vulnerable. This includes St. Vincent de Paul and Special Olympics. We receive testimonials daily from our users on how our service is helping them carry on in these difficult times. Organizations who cater to the vulnerable were already severely overwhelmed during the best of times. 

Our 2019 goal was to optimize the user experience and understand the value proposition to senior living communities by adopting such an innovation. We published case studies of the televeda service with our community partners which clearly lay out the value proposition for long term care communities: 

1. $2880 reduction in monthly costs for labor, 

2. 45% re-socialization of those objectively identified as isolated potentially rescuing $1.5M in overall LTV, 

3. 100% participating users saw potential benefits in their health and wellness and wanted to continue participating, 

4. 900% increase in attendance in less than 12 weeks

The co-founders Shruti Gurudanti (CEO) and Mayank Mishra are married and have known each other for the last 15 years. Shruti lost her grandfather to Alzheimer’s and started remotely looking after her grandmother in India who helped her see the benefits of live streaming in combating isolation. We had started with in-person activities in nursing homes but despite the reception being so overwhelming, we witnessed how several seniors were still unable to attend in-person due to a number of factors. When existing video-conferencing options such as Skype, Zoom and Hangouts seemed too difficult for seniors, we decided to build our own software based digital therapy program to bridge the gap. The results and adoption have surprised all of us involved.

I believe that accessibility is one of the most pressing problems of our times, and an oft ignored human right. As a people, we are only as strong as our weakest links. There is a belief that those who will live to be 120 years old have already been born; so ignoring the human condition for people older than 60 years is myopic and dangerous to the future of society. We are more interconnected than ever before, yet loneliness is a growing problem which is a huge strain on economic and healthcare bodies. The startup I co-founded, televeda, works on alleviating social isolation for the vulnerable. While I work on this venture as a private citizen, it is important to recognize that both private and public sector support is needed for success in outcomes. 

Personally, I am also fueled by hubris. After working as a litigation attorney in India, I moved to South Dakota to launch a telemedicine startup in 2013 serving the elderly. It failed. But I have stayed committed to not giving up and to solve this problem for an underserved population that continuously receives low quality of care.

Solving this problem has been personal. I have been involved in this mission since 2013, suffered setbacks and started working on televeda since the last 2 years. televeda has an ambitious goal to be the world’s most accessible virtual community center democratizing socialization to people of all backgrounds, abilities and cognitive levels. And to eliminate social isolation. As an empathetic product developer, I am leveraging my prior experience with live streaming and telemedicine to work closely with organizations and social workers to develop the best experience for the elderly. 

Technology is not always the most accessible medium, and specifically not designed to include users with cognitive, visual and auditory impairments. I am privileged to work with the elderly to help develop features for onboarding, registration and security to increase overall engagement for positive community building, and designing our operations and support processes to be more inclusive. This experience has allowed us to take this service to communities nationwide and internationally, across private and public domains. 

However this is not a singular endeavor. I am honored to work with our management team who has collective experience in hospitality, telemedicine, live streaming, healthcare, senior care and public policy on social isolation. Our advisors include the head of Arizona Health Services, the CEO of a senior living community, and a CMO of a med-tech company.

After the outbreak, group classes stopped. Our users would primarily attend classes as a group in recreational rooms via smart TVs. With the lockdown and closures of recreational rooms, we had to quickly pivot from group based activities to more individual streams. This meant an entirely new operations playbook, streaming experience, different class formats for engagement, more tech support resources, and architecting a new scalable topology for our servers to handle this load. We did so in 4 weeks. For context, our average 2K subscribed minutes/mo scaled to ~80K minutes within a month. Our new challenge was, without the help of organizations and their staff, how can we adequately serve individuals who are quarantined or isolated at home?

We never thought a virus would be the reason people would need to use our service. Despite the challenges, we had a duty, and opened up our classes for free to the homebound and isolated seniors who were not affiliated with any organizations and to help stressed caregivers. We are humbled by the resilience of our partners, and are now helping the Chandler Symphony Orchestra bring a free concert to the public during these times. 

The Oasis Pavilion is a low income nursing home in a rural underserved area. They were our first partner and the reason we were able to develop this venture. We had a lot of positive experiences, our case-study demonstrated a 900% increase in attendance, and miraculously one of the participants got off Hospice (on his own). After COVID-19, the community has been under severe stress. When a few residents tested positive, strict quarantine measures were imposed. Unfortunately, televeda used to be the only popular exercise option available for them in their recreational room which they would eagerly look forward to. Several residents complained and asked to join the classes, but the staff forbade it as it was no longer safe. And so regrettably we had to cancel. 

televeda recently won a grant by the Pakis Center for Business Philanthropy at the Arizona Community Foundation to help fund our tech support and scaling requirements. I have made a request to purchase a few refurbished tablets for this community so they don’t need to visit a common TV room, and can safely exercise, play bingo, karaoke and their favorite group trivia games. We are coordinating on sanitization protocols with the staff.