0:00 Introduction and Kelly’s background

Steve welcomes Kelly Tagalan, noting she is a guest he has not met before. Kelly introduces herself and her background: eight years in Australia, most of her career in education and the not-for-profit sector, motivated by leveling the playing field and scaling impact. She co-founded a charity that took her to regional Australia, then COVID prompted a career reset.

6:00 Antler and meeting co-founder Andy

Kelly describes her path to Antler: initially discouraging a friend who mentioned it, then applying alongside her, both getting in. She describes the infectious energy of the cohort, the variety of ideas from green energy to e-commerce, and meeting Andy, a former management consultant with a health background, who she initially thought was interesting but not obviously a co-founder match. Design sprints on unrelated projects changed that.

10:00 What eQALY does and why aged care needs it

Kelly describes the aged care landscape: an overwhelmed and underserved system where non-clinical workers manage complex care packages for elderly people at home, without the tools to see early warning signals. eQALY addresses the quality of life problem from the care worker’s perspective as much as from the elderly person’s, with a platform designed for the non-clinical worker who has empathy but not clinical training.

18:00 The first 10 months: registration, pilot, and paying customer

The company registered in late 2020. In 10 months it secured a community care organisation as a paying pilot customer and strategic investor, co-designed features with the actual workforce, and got live users on the platform. Kelly is candid about the gap between the early vision of 100 pilot participants and the reality of a more cautious rollout driven by the generation-specific privacy concerns of elderly people.

21:00 The Care Hub: visualising data for non-clinical workers

The Care Hub dashboard takes all sensor data and presents it in a way that a non-clinical care manager can interpret. Color-coded indicators, expandable graphs, and decision prompts guide the worker through what the data is showing and when to take action. The system is individualized: it looks at each person’s actual trend, not a generic population benchmark.

24:00 Northern Beaches pilot and the family dimension

The first live household pilot on the Northern Beaches features an elderly woman whose son has moved back to live with her. Sensors are installed and data is flowing. Kelly highlights that the family dimension of aged care is often underestimated: giving families confidence about their loved one’s wellbeing is as important as the clinical data.

31:00 Frailty monitoring, predictive analytics, and voice

Kelly explains how frailty is measured through declining physical activity, weight, and reduced outings, and how eQALY is beginning to prototype voice interaction to reduce dependency on touch screens for elderly users. The long-term roadmap includes predictive analytics, sentiment analysis, and diagnostic tools as the data set grows.

34:00 Beliefs, fundraising, and why join eQALY

Kelly reflects on the changed belief that you can always go home, now she is separated from her California family by border closures, and how that fuels her mission with eQALY. She is candid about the patience required to raise in health tech and frames the path forward as doubling down on revenue and proof before seeking institutional investment. She closes with a pitch for the impact opportunity for people who want to do something first-of-its-kind in an industry that is only just beginning to change.