For Blake Robertson, the caregiving crisis is deeply personal. As a teenager, he witnessed firsthand his mother's struggles after she became the primary caregiver of his grandfather after a cancer diagnosis.
"She had to step up and do more work at the family business," said Robertson '24 M.P.H. "She had to care for him. She had to drive him to the hospital back and forth. It put a huge strain on our family."
Later, when he was in college, Robertson again had to reckon with the demands of caregiving. This time, he was the one who needed care. He developed a severe chronic illness and was left wheelchair bound for more than two years.
"That introduced me to America's 'safety net,' which is a bit of a nightmare," he said. "I found out there are a lot of resources out there. But finding out about them and accessing them is a really difficult thing."
Luckily, Robertson was able to get the support he needed to continue living independently, and he got better. But he couldn't forget how unnecessarily difficult it had been to obtain the social services available to individuals in need.
Today, he is helping make those resources more accessible through his company Keeper Systems (formerly known as Upkeep Care), an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that connects people to social services. It builds tools for finding and using a range of resources - including housing, transportation, and financial resources - for partner organizations, such as the United Way of Connecticut. Those tools (including AI assistants) can then be used by anyone seeking help.
"The broader problem we are trying to solve is that many social resources exist, but people have difficulty accessing them," Robertson said. Each year, more than $140 billion in available social resources go unutilized because people either do not know these services exist or face barriers when trying to access them.
"We're building AI tools that will empower enterprises that are already working in the space to be able to do this more efficiently and better."
