Nursing Home for Your Backyard in a Medical Care Cottage

Everyone has concerns about what to do with aging family members, but Ken Dupin created a solution: Build them a pod. The Salem, Virginia-based pastor is the chief innovator of MEDCottage -- a nursing home-like mobile facility that families can place in their backyard as a place to care for the elderly.

The 284-square-foot units are able to connect to a home's electricity and water supplies and can can be placed on your property wherever there is space. Other features include medical considerations such as hazardous waste disposal, pathogen detection systems and devices that check your loved one's vital signs. There's also the potential for other monitoring systems including a webcam.

"I'm a minister so I visit people in nursing homes. I just never met anybody who wanted to be there," explains Dupin. "One of the greatest fears people have is being isolated from our families in our final stages of life. In the United States, our accumulated lifetime wealth is spent in that process. This is what we came up with to address the problem."