Who would have thought I would be in the business of crisis counseling.

The irony, that someone who studied sociology in undergrad would end up being a social worker when they graduated. I suppose I just took the long way around.

Half joking of course. I am merely the plumber for our crisis counseling network. In the new year we begin piloting a study involving intervention for seniors in crisis. Our platform is going to use sound detection to notify our crisis counseling ’team’ of potential adverse events; and then dropping in telephonically to intervene in potential crisis situations.

The business opportunity is huge. There was a $40M venture backed company that bailed on the space because they tried to get seniors to love their thing that is literally a robot. A robot for seniors. People gave them $40M.

It’s a pretty interesting problem. Part of what we are going to be coming up with are the scripts that are used in intervention. My business partner and whomever else are on the team are going to become trained crisis counselors. I only have to create the platform, not that building out a human-in-the-middle telephonic intervention network driven by AI at the edge is going to be easy.

If we can prove out this opportunity with our study, it will validate to the investment community that we have a solution to a problem that pretty much everyone else is failing at. Now all I have to do is pull the whole thing out of my hat; with no time to do it. This is my specialty, right? Right??

At least I can be thankful that I won’t be the one manning the phones. Until I’m the one manning the phones…

Either way I’m excited about the opportunity. When it’s all said and done I’ll have my name on a published research study. What a great opportunity to see if I really like research enough to go back and get my PhD. After having gone to conferences, run an IRB, and publishing a paper I feel like I should really understand the gears that drive this whole academia world. The last step will be figuring out how to get a grant.