Friedman said that CEDIA defines aging in place as “an older individual being able to stay in their home […] comfortably and safely, without having to move to a nursing home or an assisted living facility.”
Smart-home technology has major assistive potential for older people seeking to stay in their homes through a higher degree of independence, Friedman said. This is particularly true for the realm of voice-controlled devices and other sensors that could help first responders learn of an emergency involving an older adult who is living independently.
“There’s monitors and sensors,” Friedman said in an interview with the outlet. “And I think the overarching key and where this is going is unobtrusiveness, essentially. So the senior citizen who’s living alone doesn’t want to be monitored. They don’t want to have a camera on them. This sort of unobtrusive sensor concept, I think is where this is going — fall detection, threshold detection, things like that … is going to be an interesting future approach for dealing with aging in place.”
Internet-enabled cameras in the home have long been a privacy concern, but there seems to be more openness to the use of wearable devices with sensors, Friedman said. But for older people, wearable devices may have their own pitfalls that are not necessarily related to comfort of use.
“What we’re finding is that a lot of people have wearables, watches, or something like that,” he said. “But, an older person might forget it. The battery might not be charged. It might be left in a drawer. So we really want to make this, where [if they’ve fallen], they don’t have to crawl in a door to get the device. Or [something] in the house will notify 911 that they’ve fallen or notify a family member if that’s their desire. So I think that’s […] the next big move on this kind of technology.”
Recently, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) said it is seeking to provide more support to military veterans who want to age in place in their current homes. Smart-home technology is seen as a potential tool to assist in this effort.
Technology has begun taking up more of the conversation around aging in place. Smart-home tools have become more prevalent through U.S. tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Google as more seniors continue to prefer to age in place.
Recent surveys conducted in 2023 and 2024 by U.S. News & World Report found that 93% of respondents view aging in place as an “important goal.” The respondents also listed several specific technologies as most helpful toward this goal.
