People everywhere are living much longer these days. Between 1995 and 2024, life expectancy at birth increased by 8.4 years, to an average of 73.3 years.
Combined with declining birth rates, longer life expectancies mean that by 2050, 1 in 6 people will be over 65. But aging populations are increasing demand for already stretched healthcare services and providers.
“A few years ago, the shortage in Europe was 1.8 million caregivers. By 2030, that will be 4 million. That’s not a shift, that’s a breaking point,” says Roeland Pelgrims, CEO and co-founder of Nobi.
Belgium-based Nobi has developed an AI-powered lamp that monitors elderly residents in care homes, assisted living communities, and their own homes. Equipped with sensors and cameras, it detects when someone nearby falls and sends an alert to caregivers.
“If you zoom in on what puts the most pressure on those ever-smaller care teams, it’s falls. Falls have a massive impact on seniors’ life expectancy, and on their need of care,” adds Pelgrims.
Decreasing risks and costs
Older people are more at risk of falling due to physical frailty, cognitive conditions such as dementia, and medications that can cause dizziness or confusion. According to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), 1 in 3 people over the age of 65 experience one fall per year.
For nursing home residents in the United Kingdom, falls are the most common reason for emergency hospital transport. Each ambulance callout to deal with a fall costs around £252, ($340) and hip fractures — a common consequence of falling — cost the NHS £14,000-£14,600 ($18,902- $19,712) per person in in-patient care.
Nobi’s smart lamps record footage of the 30 seconds prior to a fall, which can then be viewed by care teams to ascertain whether an ambulance is needed.
“(Caregivers) can see if the person has bumped their head. If somebody has dementia, or if they’re feeling very unwell, they can’t necessarily tell you what they’ve bumped as they’ve fallen,” says professor Carol Holland, director of the center for aging research at the UK’s Lancaster University.
“That can prevent an ambulance callout if nothing else is clearly injured,” she explains.
An independent study by Holland’s team at Lancaster University found that Nobi’s technology — which was piloted across 80 care homes in the northwest of England — reduced ambulance callouts by 24%, with estimated annual net savings per home of between £490,237 ($661,886) and £1,487,480 ($2,008,299).
Holland adds other fall-detection devices — such as wristbands, alarm buttons and floor mats — have also decreased ambulance callout rates. But the study showed that only Nobi’s technology reduced the likelihood of falling, by 32%.
“The key thing in terms of reducing falls is that playback facility,” says Holland. “The staff can have a look at what’s going on and change something in the environment, or do a medication review,” she explains.
At night, the overhead fixture’s automatic light turns on at full brightness when it detects a user getting out of bed. Holland says this is an important safety feature for older people who often have visual impairments, because it allows them to see obstacles they might otherwise trip over in the dark.
The lamps can also pre-warn caregivers if it detects residents engaging in actions that frequently result in a fall, such as going to the toilet during the night.
“If Nobi knows someone’s in the bathroom and it’s a person at high risk of falling, it can immediately send someone to that room to proactively offer assistance, rather than waiting until the emergency call comes in,” Pelgrims explains.
In addition to financial savings for care homes, the Lancaster University study also found that Nobi’s technology reduced the average staff response time to a fall from 11 minutes to under three minutes.
“The key aim is to prevent people lying on the floor for a long time, because that can result in hypothermia and dehydration and muscle changes, and obviously it’s very distressing,” says Holland.
The device records continuously but images are deleted unless a fall is detected, and care teams then have a two-week window in which to view them before they disappear permanently from Nobi’s system.
Users can choose for the footage to be shared with clinical teams as an abstract, stick-figure rendering instead of a real video, and they can also elect for no footage to be shared and only an alert that a patient has fallen be sent to caregivers.
The global age-tech industry — products and services that aim to improve functional ability, financial security, or social participation for older adults — is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
In the US, Safely You also uses AI with wall-mounted cameras to reduce falls among seniors at care homes and retirement communities, while Voxela uses AI-powered image analysis for monitoring and preventing accidents in care facilities and hospitals.
Holland says the cost of care-related technologies is a barrier to their adoption, as is the expense of training caregivers how to use them, especially “because there’s quite a lot of turnover in care staff,” she says.
Pelgrims adds that some markets are particularly resistant to new technologies.
“In the continental European market, the funding flow to senior living is mostly governmental … which means that care organizations need government funding to implement any sort of innovation,” he says. “It takes a lot of time.”
Nevertheless, both Pelgrims and Holland believe that embracing technologies such as Nobi’s could revolutionize not only the senior care sector, but the wider healthcare industry.
“One of the issues that is very costly in care homes, not just care homes for older people, but care homes for people with mental health issues or other disabilities … is situations where somebody needs one-to-one observation maybe every 15 minutes, maybe 24/7,” Holland explains.
She says AI-driven monitoring technologies could reduce the need for such “disruptive and not terribly well-received,” observations, and ease staffing pressures while improving patients’ quality of life.
Pelgrims likewise hopes to see the Nobi lamps used for more than just fall detection and prevention. The lamps now have in-built speakers that can play white noise at night to improve sleep quality, and microphones to enable remote two-way communication with caregivers.
“I think that’s also our biggest challenge: it’s not what can we develop, but what should we develop,” says Pelgrims. “The more functionality you add to something, the more complexity you add (and) complexity is the enemy of usability.”
He also maintains that, despite the potential of technology and AI, human caregivers will always be needed.
“We don’t replace people, but we feed them the insights that they need to make sure they’re on those residents that need their help most,” he says. “For me, what success would look like for technology is that care is aways available when it’s needed — but only when it’s needed.”