Acceptance
By creating an Elderoak account or using the Elderoak iOS app or website, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
1. What Elderoak is — and is not
Elderoak is a coordination tool for families managing care for an older adult. It helps families share medication schedules, appointment calendars, aide shifts, and emergency contacts.
Elderoak is not a medical device, medical advice, an emergency service, a telemedicine platform, a clinical decision-support system, or any form of regulated health software. Information stored in the app is provided by you and your family. Decisions about medication, treatment, dosing, or emergency response remain your responsibility — and, where applicable, your healthcare provider's. The SOS button is a convenience that assists in summoning help; it is not a substitute for calling 911, 988, or any local emergency number directly. Nothing in Elderoak is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate, or prevent any disease.
2. Eligibility
You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or accept an invitation as a family caregiver or aide. The person being cared for (the "cared-for") must be at least 13 years old; Elderoak is not designed for pediatric care and we do not knowingly collect information about children under 13. If you become aware that a child under 13 has been added to a family group, contact us so we can remove the data.
The family caregiver creating a group is responsible for ensuring that anyone they invite (including the cared-for person and any paid aides) consents to having their information stored in the group and shared among other group members.
3. Your account
4. Subscriptions + billing
Elderoak Pro is sold exclusively through the Apple App Store and (when available) Google Play. Apple and Google handle all billing, including taxes, refunds, and subscription renewals. We do not process payments directly and have no access to your payment information.
Subscriptions auto-renew until you cancel. To cancel: iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions, or Google Play subscription manager. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; no partial refunds.
Refunds are issued at Apple's or Google's discretion through their respective refund flows (reportaproblem.apple.com on iOS). We cannot process refunds directly because we never received your payment.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- Use Elderoak to store information about anyone who has not consented (or whose legal guardian has not consented).
- Attempt to access another family group's data, or attempt to bypass row-level security or authentication.
- Reverse engineer, scrape, or systematically extract data from the service for purposes other than your own family care coordination.
- Upload malicious code, infringing content, or content that violates applicable law.
- Use the SOS / emergency features as a prank, or in non-emergency situations that might delay legitimate emergency response.
6. Health information accuracy
Information you store in Elderoak is only as accurate as what you enter. Always confirm medication doses, scheduling, and instructions with the prescribing clinician — Elderoak may misread a prescription label, miss an instruction, or carry over an outdated entry.
6a. Elderoak is a consumer app, not a HIPAA Covered Entity or Business Associate
Elderoak is a consumer-facing coordination tool used by families to share information they already have about a loved one's care. We are not a healthcare provider, a health plan, or a healthcare clearinghouse, and we do not act as a Business Associate of any covered entity. Health information stored in Elderoak is shared voluntarily by you and your family group; it is not Protected Health Information (PHI) under HIPAA, because no covered entity has placed it with us.
If you are a healthcare provider (doctor, nurse, clinician, paid care professional acting in that capacity), do not use Elderoak to handle patient records on behalf of your practice or employer — for that use, you need a HIPAA-compliant electronic medical record system with a signed Business Associate Agreement. Elderoak is the wrong tool for that purpose and using it that way may create regulatory exposure for you.
Recording a doctor or other clinician: in several US states, audio recordings require all parties to consent. Elderoak's doctor-visit voice-note feature prompts you to obtain that consent each time you start a recording — please honor the prompt before pressing record.
6b. Apple Watch fall detection — Elderoak is a relay, not the detector
Apple Watch — not Elderoak — runs the fall-detection logic. Apple's CMFallDetectionManagerframework performs the sensor processing, fall-event classification, on-watch prompt to the wearer, automatic call to emergency services, and notification to Apple Health emergency contacts. Elderoak does not detect falls, does not classify falls, does not place emergency calls, and is not part of Apple's emergency-services flow.
If you have granted Elderoak permission to receive fall notifications on your paired Apple Watch (a one-time iOS system prompt the first time the Elderoak Watch app launches), Elderoak subscribes to Apple'sCMFallDetectionManagerdelegate stream. When watchOS detects a fall and publishes the event to that stream, Elderoak relays a single push notification to the family group you have invited. Elderoak makes no independent determination about the wearer's safety, does not interpret motion data, and does not see the underlying sensor signals.
Apple's built-in fall-detection flow operates independently of Elderoak. Whether or not Elderoak is installed, whether or not Elderoak has permission to receive fall notifications, and whether or not the family-relay notification reaches your family group, Apple Watch's built-in flow will still show its on-watch prompt, run its auto-911 countdown, place its emergency call, and notify the wearer's Apple Health emergency contacts as Apple has designed it. You can revoke Elderoak's permission to receive fall notifications at any time via Settings → Apple Watch → Privacy & Security → Fall Detection (the system-level toggle controls all third-party apps that subscribe to fall events); doing so does not affect Apple's own flow.
6c. Notification delivery is best-effort, not guaranteed
Notifications dispatched by Elderoak — including but not limited to medication reminders, missed-dose alerts, SOS family alerts, family fall-event relays, appointment follow-ups, and aide check-in pings — are delivered through Apple Push Notification service (APNs) and, when the Android app launches, Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Delivery depends on factors outside Elderoak's control, including: APNs / FCM infrastructure availability, the recipient device being powered on and connected to a network, the recipient device's notification permissions for Elderoak, the recipient device's Focus or Do Not Disturb settings, and carrier-side delivery. Elderoak makes no warranty that any specific notification will be delivered, will be delivered promptly, or will be seen by any specific recipient. You agree not to rely on any single Elderoak notification as a guarantee that a family member, caregiver, or you will be reached.
6d. Acknowledgement of risk
The features described in §6, §6a, §6b, and §6c — including medication reminders, the SOS / get-help button, family fall alerts, doctor-visit recordings, aide check-ins, and the family timeline — are family-communication tools, not medical, clinical, or emergency services. By using Elderoak you acknowledge and agree:
- Elderoak is not a substitute for direct emergency response. In any actual emergency — including but not limited to a medical emergency, fall, or distress event — you, the cared-for person, or any family caregiver should call 911 (or your local equivalent emergency number) directly. Do not wait for an Elderoak notification or assume family members have been alerted before calling for emergency help.
- Family-relay notifications are supplementary, not primary. Notifications from Elderoak to family caregivers are an additional layer of family communication, not the sole means of emergency response. You will not rely on these notifications as the sole means of reaching family in an emergency.
- The features are not life-safety devices or systems. Critical medication schedules, time-sensitive treatments, and emergency response should have independent fallback mechanisms (e.g. a backup alarm clock, a physical pillbox, a wired medical-alert pendant, or a direct call to 911).
6e. Prescription label scanning — verify before you save
Elderoak's prescription label scanner uses on-device optical character recognition (OCR) to extract drug name, dose, frequency, refill count, and prescriber from the photo of a pill bottle. OCR is imperfect.A "10 mg" can be misread as "20 mg", a "BID (twice daily)" can be missed, and handwritten or decorative labels are read less reliably than printed labels.
You must verify every field against the original prescription label and your doctor's instructions before saving a medication or letting Elderoak schedule doses around it. The in-app Save button is disabled until you tick a required checkbox confirming that you have done this. By ticking that checkbox you represent that the medication record you are saving accurately reflects the actual prescription as written by your doctor or pharmacist.
Elderoak is not responsible for harm arising from acting on a scan result that you did not verify, that you saved without correction, or that you relied on without cross-checking against the original prescription label or your healthcare provider's instructions. Saved medications can be edited at any time, but the family will act on what is currently saved — and the cared-for person may already have taken a dose by the time an error is noticed. The scanner is a typing-saving aid, not a clinical decision-support tool.
6f. Doctor-visit voice recordings — you obtain consent
Elderoak can record audio of a conversation between the cared-for person (or a family caregiver / aide) and a healthcare provider, and store it in the family group so other family members can hear what was said. Audio is recorded only when you explicitly start a recording.
You are solely responsible for obtaining the consent of every person whose voice will be recorded before you start the recording. Eleven US states (California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington, Connecticut, and Delaware) and most Canadian provinces require all parties to a private conversation to consent to its recording. Doctor-patient conversations generally qualify as private. Recording without consent in those jurisdictions can be a criminal offense and a tort.
The in-app recording flow shows you a prompt before audio starts that asks you to confirm you have obtained the doctor's permission. Tapping "I have consent — start recording" is your representation that you obtained that consent. Elderoak does not have any relationship with your healthcare provider and is not responsible for verifying that consent was actually obtained, for the legality of your recording under any specific jurisdiction, or for any consequence — civil, criminal, or professional — arising from a recording you made.
7. Family group + role responsibilities
The family caregiver who creates a group is the group's administrator and may invite or remove members. When the cared-for person is also a user of the app, they retain access to their own data and can leave the group. Aides invited to a group have access only to assignments relevant to their shifts.
8. User-uploaded content
You retain ownership of content you upload (documents, voice notes, photos). You grant Elderoak a non-exclusive, limited license to store and display that content within your family group, solely to provide the service. We do not use your uploaded content to train models or for any purpose outside your family group.
9. Service availability
We aim for high availability but do not guarantee uninterrupted service. We may perform maintenance, deploy updates, or experience outages. Critical reminders should have a fallback (e.g. an alarm clock, a pillbox); do not rely solely on Elderoak push notifications for time-critical medication schedules.
10. Termination
You may stop using Elderoak at any time. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms or that pose a security risk to other users. On termination we will delete your data per the privacy policy.
11. Disclaimer of warranties
Elderoak is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, express or implied. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.
12. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law:
- Elderoak and its operators are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, use, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising out of or relating to your use of the service.
- Elderoak is not liable for any claim arising from a failure of notification delivery, delayed notification, or non-receipt of notification, as such delivery is best-effort under §6c.
- Elderoak is not liable for any claim arising from the operation, accuracy, or output of Apple Watch's fall-detection framework or Apple's emergency-services flow, as such operations are performed by Apple under Apple's own framework, not by Elderoak (see §6b).
- Elderoak makes no representation or warranty that its features will prevent injury, death, missed medication, missed appointments, or any other adverse outcome.
- Our aggregate liability for any and all claims arising out of these terms or your use of the service is limited to the greater of (i) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or (ii) USD $50.
If any of the limitations or exclusions above is found to be unenforceable for a particular claim, the remaining limitations and exclusions remain in full effect (severability). Nothing in this section limits or excludes liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded under applicable consumer-protection law in your jurisdiction.
13. Indemnification
You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Elderoak and its operators from and against any and all claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to:
- your violation of these terms;
- your violation of any law or regulation;
- content you upload to the service;
- your reliance on any Elderoak feature, notification, or output as a substitute for direct emergency response or as the sole means of communication with family caregivers;
- your use of the SOS / get-help button, family fall alerts, or any other Elderoak feature in a manner inconsistent with the disclaimers in §6 through §6d;
- any claim that you or a third party brings arising from the operation of Apple Watch's fall-detection framework, Apple's emergency-services flow, or any other third-party service used by Elderoak.
This indemnification does not apply to claims arising from Elderoak's gross negligence or willful misconduct, or where indemnification is prohibited by applicable consumer- protection law.
13a. Binding arbitration and class action waiver
Please read this section carefully. It affects how disputes between you and Elderoak are resolved.
Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these terms or your use of the service (each, a “Dispute”) shall be resolved exclusively through binding individual arbitration, except where applicable law prohibits such arbitration. Arbitration shall be conducted by a single arbitrator under the rules of the ADR Institute of Canada (for residents of Canada) or the American Arbitration Association (for residents of the United States). The seat of arbitration shall be the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, unless otherwise agreed in writing.
You and Elderoak each waive any right to a jury trial and any right to participate in or be represented in a class action, class arbitration, consolidated proceeding, or representative proceeding, except where such waiver is unenforceable under applicable consumer-protection law.
Carve-outs. This section does not require arbitration of: (i) claims that cannot lawfully be arbitrated under applicable consumer-protection law (including, for British Columbia residents, claims under the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act); (ii) small-claims-court claims that fall within the monetary jurisdiction of the small-claims court in your province or state; or (iii) injunctive or equitable relief to stop unauthorized use of the service or to enforce intellectual-property rights.
Opt-out. You may opt out of this arbitration provision and class action waiver by sending written notice of opt-out to within 30 days of first creating your Elderoak account, with your full name, email on file, and a clear statement that you opt out of arbitration. After 30 days, this provision becomes binding on your use of the service.
14. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be surfaced in the app before they take effect. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.
15. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of British Columbia, Canada, and the laws of Canada applicable therein, excluding conflict-of-law rules. Subject to the arbitration provisions in §13a, disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts located in British Columbia, Canada, except where local consumer-protection laws require otherwise.