Tech-enhanced Life and the Longevity Explorers have as a primary mission to help older adults and their families. Over time, we have realized that we also have a secondary mission — which is aligned with the primary one — of helping companies bring to market better products and services for older adults.
The key features of our work are independence, objectivity, and depth.
We are still exploring the optimal business model to support these missions, and on this page you can read:
- the guidelines we have set ourselves to ensure our work stays objective and without conflict of interest;
- how we have funded the organization up until now; and
- things we think you would want to know if you got as far as this page on “how we fund our work”.
Update: 2025
As of February 2025, we have separated our activities between two separate entities: Tech-enhanced Life, PBC., and Longevity Explorers LLC.
- Longevity Explorers LLC operates this website and also the Newsletter, and is funded primarily by the means outlined below, as well as by donations and subscriptions to our Longevity Explorers: Tech-enhanced Life Newsletter.
- Tech-enhanced Life, PBC focuses on advisory services to companies developing products that help older adults. We charge a professional fee for those services.
Guidelines
- We do not sell personal information about our members to third parties (see privacy policy).
- We try and be completely transparent about how our work is funded. See below.
Research Guidelines: Independent, Objective, Deep
When we undertake research into a specific topic (such as our evaluation of medical alert devices) we want to produce work that provides actionable insights to older adults and their families. We want it to be clearly independent from any manufacturer or sales channel for the products themselves, and we want the work to be done with some depth, objectivity, and analytical rigor.
To accomplish that we have laid out these guidelines for our major research initiatives on behalf of older adults and their families:
- The research we do on behalf of older adults and their families is not sponsored by the vendors of products we analyze or evaluate. [Since Sept 2019, we do sometimes allow companies to loan or donate products for evaluation (until then we bought all the products we reviewed).]
- For each research project, we assemble a team with the right credentials to create work that goes well beyond what you can find elsewhere. Where appropriate, we like to include an “expert advisory panel of clinicians, experts in aging services, and scientists” to help us focus on the right questions, and keep the analysis rigorous and objective.
- Our community of Longevity Explorers, many of whom are themselves older adults who either use the products we study or are considering using them, often participate in an active hands-on manner in our research. So our work is not only the result of some in-depth analysis of the products by “experts”, but also includes impressions and user feedback from actual users of the systems — people like you.
Funding our Work Until Now
From 2014 until 2024, Tech-enhanced Life was funded primarily by our small group of founders and advisors. In addition, when we provided advisory services to companies, we use any profits from those projects to help fund our research, and the operation of this website, and the ongoing costs of enabling the Longevity Explorer community.
Tech-enhanced Life, PBC. is a Public Benefit Corporation, which means we are able to combine a mission with a for-profit structure. You can learn more about that and why we like this approach here.
While everyone likes “free” things — and most of our work on behalf of older adults is free — we believe our research has value, and so in some cases we will charge for access to it. For example, our Newsletter has both a Free and a Paid level of subscriber. We sometimes charge a fee for events and seminars and other types of educational content.
Starting in late 2022 we occasionally ran advertisements on the pages of this website. They were clearly marked as such. We no longer do this, but reserve the right to do so in the future.
Affiliate Links
We also use affiliate links in some places on the site. For example, when we have links to specific products on Amazon or other sites at which you can buy the products, we sometimes use affiliate links. This means that if you click on those links and go to (say) Company xxx, and then end up buying a product, Company xxx will give us a small share of the revenue they make from the sale. This in no way affects the price you pay. Tech-enhanced Life and Longevity Explorers LLC belong to several affiliate programs, including the Amazon Affiliate program. As an Amazon Associate (and member of several other affiliate programs) we earn from qualifying purchases.
Donations
We accept donations to help fund our research, and if you would like to help support our work, you can donate here.
A big reason why we like making much of our research available for free is so it is available to all, regardless of their means. However quality research is costly. If you like our work and are benefiting from it, and have some spare funds, your donations will make more research possible, and allow us to keep making our work available to all.
Affiliate fees and conflict of interest and bias
We have thought long and hard about how to charge for our content. We have decided that affiliate fees are a middle ground that sometimes makes sense.
We think it is true that using affiliate links creates some conflict of interest and bias. It creates a bias to write about products that have affiliate programs, and include lots of links to those products. However we think it’s less of a conflict of interest than traditional advertising, or sponsored content of various sorts. So we are dipping our toes into the water of this approach.
At the end of the day, we think the health and future of Tech-enhanced Life will depend on maintaining our independence and objectivity. And creating useful content that our readers find of value. So we plan to be very judicious about how we use affiliate links.
If you see work on our site that you think deviates from these guidelines, please let us know (contact us).
Listings and Showcases
We used to maintain a quite extensive database of products and services that our Longevity Explorer community think seem promising for improving the quality of life of us all as we age.
This database is no longer available and we no longer maintain the Listings database.
Longevity Explorer Collection
We select certain products that our analysts and or Longevity Explorer community think especially noteworthy for inclusion in the Longevity Explorer Collection.
- We do not charge companies to be included in the Longevity Explorer Collection.
- Companies have no obligation to collaborate financially as below in order to be included in the Longevity Explorer Collection, but in some cases they may do so.
Collaborations and Financial Relationships
- In some cases we develop partnering relationships with companies whose products we like, and in such cases Tech-enhanced Life readers benefit from special discounts, and we sometimes use affiliate links (where we get a modest commission if people purchase a product after following links from this site to the vendor’s site and purchasing there).
- On occasion we collaborate with other organizations to create educational content for older adults, caregivers, and entrepreneurs. In some cases those organizations may compensate us for our work.