Cinnamon Care Collection is fitting infrared sensors and AI into residents’ rooms across its care homes, so a carer is alerted the moment someone falls or starts to show the signs of one. The group says emergency 999 call-outs have fallen by 63% in homes using the system. At the other end of age tech, around two million people in the UK rely on a telecare alarm, the pendant or button that calls for help after a fall, often through a council-run service. Many of those alarms were built for the old analogue phone network, which closes for good on 31 January 2027.
Both are age tech: technology designed to help people live well as they get older. One kind is learning to spot trouble as it happens. The other has to keep working through the biggest change to Britain’s phone lines in a generation.
In June, we asked what would happen if technology helped us stay independent for longer, and argued that it should help people stay safe, connected and in control of their own lives. Since then, the government has published guidance on using AI in adult social care. In September, the Prime Minister set out plans for a National Care Service with free personal care, and the 28 October Budget confirmed that the Triple Lock on the State Pension will be adjusted from the next Parliament to help pay for it. The analogue phone network still closes on 31 January 2027, with no delay expected.
Whether technology can help is no longer in doubt. The harder question is whether we are ready for it: the services, the rules, and the millions of older people who will use it. Below, we look at where the evidence stands, who is missing out, and the dates that will tell us more.
Age tech in brief
Age tech comes in three broad kinds:
- Safety and monitoring: telecare alarms, falls detection, and sensors that learn someone’s normal routine and notice when it changes
- Health at home: remote monitoring, virtual wards and online access to GPs and hospital teams
- Connection and daily life: video calls, smart speakers, medication reminders, smart-home controls and virtual reality
Its reach goes well beyond the NHS and care homes:
- Health and social care: the NHS, councils, care homes and home-care agencies
- Telecoms: phone lines, mobile networks and the alarm services that run on them
- Housing: adapted homes, retirement housing and the sensors built into them
- Consumer technology: phones, tablets, speakers and wearables bought by older people and their families
What has changed since June
| What we said in June | What we know now |
|---|---|
| Falls technology is moving from reacting to predicting | More care homes are buying it, but the one large evaluation shows a smaller effect than the sales figures |
| Healthcare could come to the patient | Virtual wards and the NHS App have grown, but both assume someone can get online |
| Monitoring raises an enormous ethical challenge | Government guidance on AI in care has arrived, but rules on AI and cameras are still taking shape |
| Britain’s digital divide creates a serious problem | Most people aged 65+ in England are not fully online |
| We should design for people, not stereotypes | We didn’t look at ethnicity. Black older people are the most likely to be rarely or never online |
| We didn’t cover the phone switchover | A fixed deadline, no delay, and telecare users still to be found and checked |
| We didn’t ask who pays | Free personal care is promised, and the detail waits for the Casey Commission in 2027 |
A 20-year gap in healthy life
England is ageing fastest at the oldest end. The Centre for Ageing Better projects that the number of people aged 80 and over will more than double by 2065, while the group aged 65 to 79 grows by more than a third.
Living longer is not the same as living well. In England, a man can expect to live to 79.4 and a woman to 83.3, but healthy life expectancy is only about 61, which leaves between 18 and 22 years in less than good health. The gap between places is wider still: a woman in England’s most deprived areas can expect 48.2 years of good health, against 68.5 in the least deprived. For age tech, that is the target. The aim is more good years for the people who currently get the fewest.
From reacting to predicting
Falls: a turning point in later life
A fall is often a sign of something else, such as frailty, an infection or a side effect of medication, and for many people it is the moment independence starts to slip: a hospital stay, a loss of confidence, and sometimes a move into care. Around a third of people aged 65 and over fall each year. In 2024/25, falls led to 221,600 emergency hospital admissions for people aged 65 and over in England, and there were 60,927 emergency admissions for hip fracture, most of them caused by a fall. Up to one in ten 999 calls to ambulance services is about a fall.
Buying ahead of the evidence
In June we described Whzan Guardian, a UK system that uses sensors to track how people move around a room. The Department of Health and Social Care cited care-home pilots showing 66% fewer falls and around 97.5% fewer ambulance call-outs after falls, and gave North East London £1 million to test it further in Redbridge. There, an 18-month pilot began in December 2024 and was due to finish around the middle of this year. It combined movement sensors, AI that reads patterns in electricity use, a voice-based health coach, and a wearable band that flags mobility problems. We have found no published results from its evaluation.
Other providers have not waited for those results. Cinnamon expects to finish its rollout by December 2026. The government’s new AI guidance links to a case study from Hartland House, a care home in Cumbria, where Nobi smart lamps, which detect falls and light the room, were tried with eight residents at high risk of falling. The home says falls were “cut by 84%”. In May, Lancaster University published an evaluation of the same lamps across 79 care homes in Lancashire and South Cumbria, commissioned by the NHS body that paid for the rollout. It found 32% fewer falls and 23% fewer ambulance call-outs.
The three figures measure different things in different settings, so they can’t be ranked directly. But the same lamps reported an 84% cut with eight residents and a 32% cut across 79 homes, which is still a substantial fall. The technology may well work. Care homes are simply adopting it faster than independent results are published, and a system that works in a well-staffed home may not work in a stretched one. For a start-up, paying for an independent evaluation early is one way to stand out from the sales figures.
Inside a kitchen built for four generations
UKBlackTech co-founder Mark Martin has long been passionate about age tech. In September 2021 he travelled to Newcastle to see the innovation happening in the region, and visited The Catalyst, the innovation centre at Newcastle Helix that is home to the UK’s National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA) and the National Innovation Centre for Data. We wrote about the trip at the time.
With Steve Caughey, then Director of the National Innovation Centre for Data, he toured the 4Gen Kitchen, a fully working prototype designed by Johnny Grey and Professor Peter Gore to suit everyone from young children to older adults. The oven, sink and worktops rise and fall to suit a child, a wheelchair user or an adult. The floor detects spills: the kitchen sounds a warning, changes the colour of its lights to flag the slip hazard, and turns off the water until the spill is dealt with. Drawers respond to who is in the room, so a child on their own can’t open the knife drawer.
That spill sensor removes the hazard before anyone slips, rather than waiting for an alarm after a fall. The design began with research through NICA’s VOICE network of citizens of all ages, and as Professor Gore puts it, the team “focussed on the problems people have” rather than on why people have them. Five years on, its designer is looking for a permanent home for the prototype, but the idea behind it has not dated.
The home that notices
The next step may be almost invisible. Imagine sensors that learn that someone usually gets up at 7am, goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on. One morning there is no movement, or the kettle stays cold. On its own, no single signal means something is wrong, but together they could be an early warning that someone needs a call or a visit. Monitoring doesn’t have to mean surveillance: a good system understands enough to help without watching a person’s every move.
The telecare switchover nobody can afford to get wrong
Our June article missed the most urgent age tech story of the year. The UK’s old analogue phone network is being switched off, and every landline is moving to a digital, internet-based service. For most people, that means plugging the phone into their broadband router instead of the wall socket. For telecare users the stakes are higher, because many alarms were designed to call out over the old copper line.
It has gone wrong before. Which? reported that two telecare users died in 2023 after their alarms failed following a line change, although the provider said it had no reason to believe the switchover played a part. In December 2025, Ofcom fined Virgin Media £23.8 million for “serious systemic failures” in how it moved telecare customers, putting thousands of telecare users at risk. Phone companies have signed a charter promising no forced switches until customers who rely on telecare are protected, and the government’s action plan says no telecare user should be moved until a working solution is confirmed.
The Telecare Services Association says that, to its knowledge, there will be no delay. BT says more than 95% of its landline customers have moved, and most home customers who haven’t switched by the deadline will be moved to a temporary, emergency-calls-only service rather than being cut off, so families should check with the alarm provider that an alarm will work on it. BT has also agreed with Ofcom to add extra checks to find telecare users before their line is switched, with the last changes due by the end of November 2026. But Openreach, which runs most of the UK’s phone lines, estimated that 1.5 million lines were still on the old network at the end of July.
If a relative has an alarm, tell both the phone company and the alarm provider, press the test button after any change to the line, and ask about battery back-up, because a digital landline stops working in a power cut.
Here, unlike almost anywhere else in age tech, the date is fixed and the people at risk are known. If the switchover goes badly, it will be hard to trust the more ambitious promises. It is also the most immediate opening for innovators, from digital alarms to the people who install and test them.
Care that comes to you
Those promises start with care at home. Poor health or limited mobility can create a vicious cycle: getting around gets harder, so appointments get harder, so health gets worse.
The biggest example is the virtual ward, also called hospital at home. It gives people hospital-level care in their own home, either instead of an admission or so they can leave hospital sooner. A team led by a senior clinician visits in person, and some wards add remote monitoring of readings such as oxygen levels. Frailty is one of the main types. By September 2026, about seven in ten of England’s virtual ward “beds” were in use. In November 2025, the government launched dozens of remote monitoring pilots, letting patients send readings and symptoms to specialist teams through the NHS App, and it estimates they could free around 500,000 appointments a year once fully running.
The NHS App now has more than 39 million users. In the 2026 GP Patient Survey, 54% of those who had tried it said it was easy to contact their practice that way, up from 49% in 2025. The government plans 250 neighbourhood health centres by 2035, with 120 open by 2030, to bring more care closer to home. A blood pressure reading doesn’t always need a trip to the GP or hospital. But almost all of this assumes someone who can use an app, or has someone to use it for them. Carers can ask the GP practice for proxy access to a parent’s NHS App account.
Staying connected
Independence isn’t only physical. Someone can be safe at home and still be lonely, and video calls, online communities and shared activities can help. It matters who already has support. The Centre for Ageing Better found that 63% of women aged 50 and over in England from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups say they would definitely have someone there for them if they needed support, compared with 78% of White women the same age. For men, the figures are 58% and 69%.
Virtual reality gets the most attention. Someone with limited mobility can visit a museum, a familiar street or another country. The NHS has built 360-degree VR resources for care homes, but they are training resources for care home and NHS staff, on topics such as mobility and falls, and dementia, rather than a proven treatment for loneliness. Research on VR for older adults is promising for engagement and wellbeing, but not yet strong enough to say it solves isolation. The bigger opportunity is technology that keeps human relationships going.
Who is left offline
Each of those services assumes older people are online. In September, Age UK published the most detailed picture yet for England. Only 15% of people aged 65 and over, about 1.6 million, are fully digitally included. Around 4.1 million are partly or fully excluded, and 1.4 million don’t go online at all. Among those offline, 49% say they lack the IT skills and 30% say they don’t trust the internet.
Across the UK, Black older people are the most likely to be rarely or never online. Age UK’s analysis of the Understanding Society survey found that Black people aged 65 and over are almost twice as likely as White British people of the same age to use the internet less than once a month or never. That says more about how services have been designed and offered than about Black elders themselves.
A brilliant health app is useless to someone who can’t confidently use a smartphone, and a “digital first” NHS risks becoming “digital only” for the people these services reach least. The complexity should sit underneath the experience. The best age tech needs almost no digital interaction from the person it helps, which means phone, voice and in-person support belong in the product from the start.
Who gets to age well
Many of today’s older Black Britons are the Windrush generation and their children, and many of them worked in the NHS and the public services now going digital. Of people in England and Wales who were born in Jamaica, 40.2% are aged 65 or over, compared with 18.6% of the population as a whole.
Britain’s older population is also changing in who it includes. The share of people aged 65 and over from Black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic backgrounds grew between the last two Censuses, and among people aged 50 to 64 it is twice as high again. There are around 443,000 Black people aged 50 to 64, nearly three times as many as are aged 65 and over.
Health does not age evenly either. A 2021 study by the Universities of Sussex and Manchester, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, found that Black Caribbean people report poor health at the same rate as White British people around ten years older. Pakistani and Bangladeshi people had rates of poor health equivalent to White people at least 20 years older. The ONS still doesn’t publish healthy life expectancy by ethnic group, so the full picture is missing from the national data.
Older people are not one group. A fit 70-year-old and a frail 70-year-old with several long-term conditions need very different things, and age alone tells designers remarkably little. Technology built around one idea of what an older person is like will miss the people whose need is greatest. The answer is to involve older people from every community in designing it, and founders with roots in those communities start with an advantage: they already know who to ask.
The privacy bargain
Every system in this article runs on personal data, and that raises an uncomfortable question. How much monitoring should someone accept in exchange for staying in their own home? A system that tracks your movement, sleep, electricity use and medication could keep you safer, but it could also create one of the most intimate datasets imaginable.
CCTV in care homes: who decides?
The sharpest version of that question is CCTV. Some families want cameras in care homes, especially those whose relatives can’t speak up for themselves because of advanced dementia or a disability. They want evidence when an injury can’t be explained, a deterrent against neglect, and reassurance when they can’t visit. Campaigns for compulsory CCTV have run since at least 2014. In 2016, a petition backed by Hudgell Solicitors’ LOVE campaign asked the government to require cameras in every care home. The government said it did not object to CCTV case by case, but would not make it compulsory. Many care workers see a benefit too, because clear footage can protect staff against false allegations.
Other families, and many care workers, push back. A care home is someone’s home, and filming people while they dress, wash or are confused strips away their dignity. Constant filming can push staff towards defensive, rule-bound care, at the cost of warmth, and relatives and staff alike fear cameras will become a cheap substitute for enough staff. In a GMB union survey of 2,000 members working for a residential and nursing care provider, reported in 2016, 70% agreed cameras could help identify abuse, yet 71% worried they would invade residents’ privacy.
The regulator sits in the middle: the Care Quality Commission neither requires nor bans surveillance. Its guidance says cameras can help keep people safe, as long as providers respect people’s privacy and human rights. People must be told when cameras are in use. Recordings are personal data under data protection law, which the Information Commissioner’s Office enforces. Hidden cameras are only likely to be right in rare cases, for a short time. When someone lacks the capacity to decide about a camera in their own room, the Mental Capacity Act requires the decision to be made in their best interests, choosing the least restrictive option.
Newer technology widens the choice. Many of the falls systems in this article, such as infrared room sensors, are designed to spot a fall without anyone watching a video feed. They can’t answer every fear families have about neglect, but the options are no longer just cameras or nothing. If you are choosing a home, ask what it uses, who sees the alerts or footage, how long recordings are kept, and how your relative’s consent or best interests were decided.
Can AI give carers more time?
Some of the newest systems listen rather than watch. In a pilot across six care homes run with Dorset Council and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, Ally Cares placed acoustic and motion sensors in residents’ rooms that alert night staff to sounds such as coughing, choking, calls for help or restlessness, with no cameras. Comparing the months before and after installation, the councils reported 58.2% fewer unwitnessed bedroom falls, 63.7% fewer ambulance call-outs and 79.3% fewer hospital transfers. Two thirds of the homes cut their scheduled night checks, so residents were woken less often. Five of the six homes saw the benefits, and there was no comparison group, so like the other figures in this article it shows promise rather than proof.
That is the case for AI in care: if technology takes on routine night checks, care notes and rotas, staff get more unhurried time with the people they look after. Critics see the opposite risk. AI-drafted care plans could read the same for everyone, staff could trust a dashboard over what they can see in front of them, and chatbots or robotic pets could be offered as a cheaper substitute for conversation. Which way it goes is a management choice, not a feature of the technology. The test for any care home is whether residents get more time with a person once the system arrives, or less.
Guidance on AI in care arrives
Guidance for the newer, AI-driven systems is only now taking shape, though data protection law already applies. On 29 September, the government published “Using AI in adult social care”, guidance for providers on using AI safely. It lists uses already in place, from sensor monitoring and care planning to chatbots and pain assessment, and says a member of staff must review any care plan drafted by AI. In May, the Care Quality Commission said it does not approve specific AI products and will check that providers meet its existing standards whatever technology they use. NICE, which advises the NHS on what works, is now setting the evidence that digital care products must show, with standards due in spring 2027.
Care homes are not waiting. A small survey of 26 care leaders by Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, Care England, the Digital Care Hub and Serene Care found that most already use AI every day, and that uncertainty about how to govern it is a major challenge. A supplier that turns up with clear answers is easier to buy from.
Good principles are not complicated. People should know what is collected, who sees it, why, and for how long. Systems should process data locally where they can, collect only what they need, and alert carers to meaningful changes rather than streaming everything. Built in from the start, those protections also reassure the families and care homes deciding what to buy.
Would age tech pass the Townhouse test?
The UKBT Institute’s Practitioner Readiness Level (PRL) starts where most innovation tests stop, with “should we build it?” rather than “can we build it?” or “will someone pay?” We picture a house, the Townhouse, with twelve voices in it, from the people who use a product every day to the people who pay for it and the local community. Each asks one question only they can answer. An idea needs eleven yeses. If any voice raises a red flag, the idea must change, stop, or go ahead only with a written decision to accept the risk.
We assessed age tech against the seven voices where the evidence in this article says the most:
Only one of the seven gives a clear yes, so on our reading age tech is not ready to proceed as it stands. Carers and care staff see the need every day, though few have been asked which tools they want. The people who pay are buying in pockets, and we found no dedicated national fund for care technology. The non-technologist’s red flag matters most. Any service that assumes an app, a login or a smartphone fails many of the people it is meant to serve, unless someone has decided, on the record, how those people will be reached.
Where the jobs are
If the voices are missing, the fix starts with people. Adult social care in England has 1.59 million filled posts and around 96,000 vacancies on any given day. The vacancy rate has fallen to 6.2%, the lowest in a decade, but Skills for Care says the sector will need 410,000 more posts by 2040. Technology won’t replace those people, but it will change their jobs. A government survey carried out in early 2025 found that 27% of care providers used none of the care technologies it asked about, rising to 40% of the smallest providers, who have the least money to invest. 39% named staff’s lack of digital skills as a barrier, and 58% said upskilling the workforce would help, which only works if the training is paid and done in work time.
That opens a wide range of work, and much of it doesn’t need a computer science degree: engineers who install and test digital telecare, digital champions who help older people get online, data analysts in councils and care groups, designers who build for people with limited sight or dexterity, cybersecurity specialists who protect sensors in people’s homes, evaluators who can tell a real result from a sales pitch, and care workers who become their home’s digital lead. The smallest care providers are the least served market of all.
So, are we ready?
Some of us are. Many are not, yet.
- The technology is nearly ready. Sensors, smart lamps and remote monitoring are working in real care homes and NHS services. The evidence is promising, but thinner than the sales figures.
- The services are not, yet. Without a dedicated fund, whether you get care technology depends on which council or care group you happen to live under.
- The rules are catching up. Guidance has arrived, but nobody has yet said what counts as good enough evidence.
- The people who will use it have barely been asked. The plans assume a login, and the people least likely to have one are the people they are meant to serve. That is where the best products will start.
Two futures are open. In one, age tech becomes as ordinary as a handrail: sensors that spot a change before a fall, check-ups that don’t need a journey, and alarms that simply work because someone was paid to check them, with clear rules on what is collected and why. In the other, services move online and the people who most need them, the oldest, the poorest and those least online, are left on the wrong side of the screen.
Think again of the sensor and the alarm from the opening. Which of them defines Britain’s ageing future depends on who designs, installs and runs these systems, and whether older people from every community help write the rules. The best technology for an ageing society may be the kind that lets older people keep doing more for themselves. Never skip a voice.
Four dates to watch
- End of November 2026. BT’s last telecare safeguards, agreed with Ofcom, are due to be in place.
- 31 January 2027, the analogue switch-off. Watch February closely, because the first weeks after the deadline will show whether every telecare user was found and checked.
- Early 2027, the NHS productivity and AI review announced in the Budget, followed in spring 2027 by NICE’s evidence standards for digital care technologies. Together they will show whether care technology is judged on results or on promises.
- Summer 2027, the Casey Commission report. It will set out how and when the National Care Service and free personal care are built up. Its first research report, on how social care is governed, came out on 11 November 2026.
We’ll return to this in February, once the switch-off has happened.
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