Elecia White spoke with Elizabeth Brenner about devices that can be used to help families worry less about grandparents who live alone (and 87-year-old neighbor friends named Dolores).
Life Alert is the big name in senior push-button call systems. Life Call are the "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" people. (See the commercial!) Life Call and Lileline have accelerometers to detect falls.
Twilio allows programs to send and receive phone calls and text messages using its web service APIs.
If This Then That (ifttt.com) connects channels to allow an event to trigger other events (i.e. "failed to twitter today" -> text family) .
Fibit API for connecting Fitbit data to other applications.
We didn't talk about this but it is a similar idea: Goodnight lamp.