Feb 02, 2018
Theora Care – The Beginning

Hi, my name is Steve Popovich. I am the CEO and founder of Clairvoyant Networks. We make products that help family and professional caregivers provide better care to their loved ones and clients, all while enhancing the caregiver’s peace of mind. Caregiving is a stressful, but honorable role. Everyone at our company is or has been a caregiver, so they understand what would be useful and helpful to the caregiving journey. This is my story of why our team is developing Theora Care products for caregivers. I have worked in the technology connectivity space for 25 years, helping businesses use technology to solve problems, resulting in increased productivity and to run more efficiently. During the last decade, I worked with healthcare companies and I saw that the aging in place market was exploding as our population aged. The need for caregiving was escalating, and in many families, family members are the caregivers for loved ones. But they also have jobs, their own families and a home to take care of, now times two. The turnover of paid caregivers is high, resulting in risks with ongoing care.

Steven Popovich,
President of
Clairvoyant Networks LLC

It was during this period that I also became a caregiver and gained a real-life understanding of what being a caregiver entailed, and how little technology was available to help a caregiver. Most technology “solutions” were one-off gadgets or service interventions, to quote a wise woman in the industry. As we dove into it more, we found conditions like memory care had no cost-effective technology solutions that were being applied, even though these conditions are much more common than I thought. It’s ironic because almost every other industry in the business sector has benefited greatly from technology changes in the last decades, but if you look at caregiving for somebody with Alzheimer’s — it’s really no different today than it would’ve been 20 or 30 years ago. This is a crime in my mind because obviously caregivers have a limited amount of time and it’s a very stressful situation. I thought, given my background, what if could I build a true technology solution that would give family and professional caregivers a way of understanding what’s happening without having to actually be there. If your mom lives alone, like mine, what’s happening with mom? I can’t be there all the time, but I surely could use a simple way of understanding when there may be some kind of involvement required. But first I had to build the platform – so two years ago we began working on technology that would work for both businesses that are in elder care, and the family caregivers. Clairvoyant Networks is the company that makes the platform and the Theora Care products. The way I look at Clairvoyant is it’s an umbrella technology business. Some of the technology that we’re developing, like ultra-wideband, would traditionally be used in a hospital, or other healthcare institution. So, what we’ve done is take the same kind of scalable technology that is usable in the business environment and put some secret sauce in it to make it economically usable in a home environment. I don’t know anybody else who has done that in this space. Most products are developed to solve one specific need, like a GPS tracking watch, and do not interoperate with other products. In our case, we’ve actually made it so that we can scale and grow our solution as the conditions progress.. The limited amount of products that are out there right now, like home automation devices, are not well suited for a lot of different use cases or situations for long term either for the long-term caregivers with loved ones, or people who are living independently that have long-term illnesses. It was a business opportunity and a personal opportunity.