Why we built Lanturne

Most of the apps we make at Technium Foundry help people stand up for themselves when the other side knows more than they do. That's what DealJudge, Veilbreaker and Overquoted are for. We always start the same way: we look for a spot where regular people lose out, and then we build an app that fixes it.

Lanturne doesn't fit that pattern, because there's nobody on the other side to bargain with. We built it because of something that happened in one of our own families.

One of our engineers has a mom who lives overseas. There's an ocean between them, and they're most of a day apart.

For years he called her every Sunday. If she picked up, he knew her week had been fine. If she didn't, he kept calling, because her phone was often in her coat pocket, in another room or on silent. Some Sundays he couldn't reach her until the evening, and by then he'd thought of every bad reason she might not be answering.

Then one Sunday she didn't answer at all.

The next morning her neighbor called him. His mom had fallen in the kitchen the day before. She was all right, but she'd been on the floor for hours, and her phone was on the table across the room.

He told us about it that week, and together we looked for something that would let him know right away if his mom fell or he stopped hearing from her, wherever in the world he happened to be. Most of what we found were medical alert pendants that come with a monthly contract and a call center. His mom wouldn't wear a pendant. Wearing one meant, to her, that she was old and needed watching, so she took it off and put it in a drawer. The rest were apps that only work when the phone is in your hand, which is exactly when you don't need them.

She already wore a smartwatch every day, and she liked it. It was on her wrist when she fell. That watch could tell when it was being worn, it could read her pulse and detect a fall, and it was connected to the internet. But nothing on it could let her son know she needed help.

What bothered him most, and then all of us, was that every product we looked at needed something to happen first. She had to press a button or be awake enough to do something, or the fall had to be hard enough for the device to notice. Lying on her kitchen floor, she couldn't do any of that, and none of them would have sent anybody an alert.

So we built the part that was missing, an alert that doesn't need a button press or a fall. If she has the watch on and it finds no pulse and no movement for longer than the time her son picked, he gets an alert. He also gets one if the watch stops reporting. Nobody has to press anything for either of those.

Once a day the watch also asks her one question, and she answers it right there on the watch. If she doesn't answer, he finds out. If she can reach the help button, his phone shows him where she is. There's no call center in between, and his phone can be anywhere in the world. A watch with its own mobile connection needs nothing else. A watch without one reaches us through her home Wi-Fi, or through her phone if it's nearby.

We still look for the spots where regular people lose out. This time we didn't have to look very far, because it was happening to one of us.

The team at Technium FoundryJacksonville, Florida