Mike Link and Kami Vision Spent Four Years Inside Care Facilities Before Bringing Fall Detection Home
Most consumer technology companies do it the other way round. Build for the mass market, gather data, then move upmarket into professional settings once the product is proven.
Kami Vision inverted that. Its fall detection system went into senior living communities and skilled nursing facilities first, in early 2022, and stayed there through 2025. Only after four years of running inside professional care environments did the Palo Alto company begin testing a version for private homes.
Mike Link, chief operating officer at KamiCare, describes the sequence as deliberate, and the reasoning is straightforward. A fall inside a facility happens within reach of trained staff. A fall at three in the morning in an empty kitchen happens with nobody watching, and the person on the floor is often the least able to summon help. The company wanted the version with no safety net solved before it went near a living room.
The $80 Billion Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
Falls sit in an odd position in American health economics. The costs are enormous, the numbers well documented, and almost nobody plans for them until one happens.
Federal data show fall-related injuries now cost more than $80 billion annually. Every 11 seconds, an older adult arrives in an emergency room after a fall. A single fall-related hospital admission averages around $30,000.
That figure is only the opening entry. A fall that produces a hip fracture frequently produces something else: a transition into long-term care. The one-time expense becomes recurring, and that is where household finances break.
Set that against the demographics and the pressure becomes clearer. More than 61 million Americans are 65 or older, a population that grew 13 percent between 2020 and 2024 and outpaced overall population growth. AARP research finds 77 percent of adults over 50 want to stay in their own homes as they age.
The existing care infrastructure cannot absorb that preference affordably. Nursing homes with private rooms average over $10,000 a month. Assisted living runs close to $6,000, with costs up 10 percent in 2024 alone. For most families, the arithmetic increasingly favors technology that makes staying at home safer over the institutional alternative.
What Four Years in Nursing Homes Taught the Technology
KamiCare entered professional care environments in early 2022 and expanded through 2025. The company gained not just deployment scale, but conditions no consumer beta could replicate.
The platform now detects ground-level events with high accuracy, built on thousands of documented fall incidents recorded across real care settings. It runs continuously and asks nothing of the person it protects, which is the entire point. A pendant alarm depends on someone pressing a button in the exact moment they are least capable of pressing it. Passive detection removes the person from the equation, and that removal is what closes the gap.
The system reads more than sudden falls. It picks up an inability to rise unassisted, early signs of mobility decline, and patterns suggesting a resident needs more support than their care plan provides. For operators managing liability across dozens of residents, that distinction between an incident and a trend turns a safety device into a care planning tool.
That accumulation is what separates a working system from a promising one. Kami Vision now protects residents across thousands of beds in senior living facilities nationwide, backed by a portfolio of 60 patents in computer vision and camera technology. Very few consumer health products arrive having already been stress-tested in the environment where the stakes are highest.
The Two Features a Care Facility Never Needed
The consumer product entered beta testing in United States homes during 2025, with a full rollout expected in the second half of 2026.
Kami Vision is building partnerships to support that launch rather than relying on direct-to-consumer marketing alone. The reasoning is practical. Fall detection is rarely something a household goes looking for. It gets recommended, usually by a care provider, a physician, or an insurer at the moment a family is already worried. Reaching people through the channels they already trust is more efficient than cold-calling them.
The home version adds two features the facility product never needed. Live view lets families check in without waiting for an alert. Two-way audio lets them speak to a parent directly in the moments after an event, when the most useful thing is often a voice rather than a notification.
The privacy architecture stayed the same. The system records only during detected events rather than continuously, and unobscured footage is available exclusively to family members who have been explicitly authorized. That constraint was built for regulated care settings and carried over unchanged.
The escalation sequence follows the same logic. When an event is detected, the alert reaches the resident first. If they cannot respond, designated contacts are notified automatically, with the option to call 911 through the app. Families keep control of the response while the time between incident and intervention compresses.
One Set of Algorithms, Four Different Businesses
KamiCare is one product line among several built on the same Vision AI foundation.
Kami Pro Security applies the technology to retail locations, warehouses and commercial facilities. KamiCloud handles smart security notifications and video storage. The shared infrastructure means investment in core detection compounds across every line rather than serving one vertical.
At CES 2026, Kami Vision showed a companion smart ring tracking heart rate, blood oxygen, and sleep patterns, extending monitoring beyond the range of a fixed camera. For older adults who remain active and mobile, that closes a coverage gap the camera alone cannot.
The scale underneath all of it is substantial. An early growth round of $10 million from East West Bank funded the buildout that brought the platform to six million users across 120 countries and 15 million devices, currently handling 248 million daily alerts and 25 petabytes of data.
Facilities Buy for Liability. Families Buy for Worry.
The 2026 rollout is the real test, and the two buyers could hardly be less alike. A facility purchases fall detection as a risk calculation: liability exposure, staffing ratios, regulatory obligation. A family purchases it because a daughter has started calling her mother twice a day and still lies awake. One decision is made on a spreadsheet. The other is made at midnight.
What the company brings to that second decision is unusual for a consumer launch. Most home health technology arrives asking families to trust a claim. This one arrives after four years in the buildings where falls happen most often, with accuracy figures drawn from documented incidents rather than laboratory conditions, and with privacy limits written for regulated care settings long before any household was asked to accept them.
Falls are a predictable and growing cost, affecting a population expanding faster than the infrastructure built to care for it. Detection technology addresses that at a fraction of the problem’s cost. Whether households adopt it at the rate facilities did is the question the coming year answers.
Care providers evaluating KamiCare and families following the home rollout can request a demo through the company’s site.
