- 9 June 2026
- |Leadership, Taking risks, Technology
Part one of five short articles on just some of the many barriers faced by both public sector buyers and technologists when trying to bring inventions to market that can improve lives and save money.
Although I use technology for older people as a reference point, many of the themes I touch upon should have parallels for anyone, on either side of the table in bringing meaningful tech to the masses. For brevity quite complex themes are abbreviated in these articles, but I hope you enjoy them. Take what you enjoy.
“Wow, this sounds like exactly what the world needs right now – you must be hugely busy?”
Whenever I tell people what Alertacall does, the technology company I founded that increases valuable touchpoints with older people, this is invariably one of the first things they say.
It was pretty much exactly what some senior government people said to me, when I met them at an event last month and, of course, it is easy to understand why.
In a nation with an ageing population and limited health and social care resources, a system which maintains contact with older people, keeps them safe and which can save housing providers, social care and the NHS huge amounts of money is, clearly, a no-brainer.
It should be delivered almost as standard, a utility for the vulnerable and people of a certain age? And, surely, any organisation with decent technology to genuinely support these issues should have easy access to a large market. I wish this were true.
The reality is that adoption of innovation in the health, housing and social care sector is glacially slow. Although at Alertacall we are fortunate to work with some forward-thinking providers, there are many more who are missing out on the benefits innovation could bring.
Over the coming series of articles, I will explore some of the reasons why this is the case, suggest some ideas for overcoming the barriers and discuss the consequences of inaction. But first, a question …
Just where the heck is all the incredible innovation for older people?
Last year, I was honoured by King Charles to be made MBE for ‘Services to Technology for Older People’. I received this partly in recognition of inventing the ‘I am okay’ button and the tens of thousands of people this and other inventions of mine have gone on to help.
When I did a bit of Googling, I discovered that no-one else has ever been honoured for developing this kind of technology for older people. A surprise at first, this actually became much less surprising when I considered that, within the UK at least, I think I know of almost every organisation working in this space and I could count them on my fingers.
Given that it is broadly acknowledged that the ageing population is going to create some of the biggest health, social care, housing and economic challenges we will ever see, why have there been so few people turning their attention to this issue? Just what is going on?
Recently, other companies working in the “telecare space” – have begun offering services which are similar to those I invented 20 years ago.
(Telecare is a catch all term, which has historically really referred to the ‘alarm’ style ‘panic button’ products. It is slowly growing in remit under some decent forward thinking leadership from the trade body).
Yet, even with more operators in the market, often investing considerable time, effort and money in sales and marketing, both true innovation, and adoption of innovation is nowhere as rapid as it should be. In fact, after over 20 years doing this, the landscape almost looks exactly the same.
But what even is “technology”?
At this point it is important to make something clear.
In the modern world, technology has become synonymous with gizmos and gadgets, AIs and silicon valley tech companies. In fact, ask most people for an example of tech and they will probably point to their smartphone or tablet.
However, technology encompasses much more than this. It is the application of systems and processes. It is problem solving. It is the way we do things, not just the tools we use to do them.
If you come up with a smart, and efficient way to make something work better, something novel and replicable – it’s legitimate to call that a form of technology.
In the housing and social care sector – in the majority of cases – providers are still using the same delivery models, the same delivery technology, which they were using 20 years ago. And, to some extent. I think the case is true within the NHS.
Not only have most operators failed to adopt devices and systems which can help, they have not changed their fundamental approach
At the root of this is a kind of negative feedback loop driven by a fundamental and uncomfortable truth about technological innovation for older people.
“Younger people” focus on “younger people’s” experiences
I have come to realise that, as a founder and inventor, I am a bit of an anomaly.
As a teen and then 20-something geek coming of age in the mid-nineties, I followed a familiar path to many others of my generation, harnessing the ever-increasing power of computers and communication systems to solve problems and build businesses.
Then, I did something which I have come to realise is quite unusual: I started caring about the needs of older people or, to be more precise, one older person in particular, my gran, Eveline.
For various reasons, in my late 20s, I was directly involved in efforts to look after my gran, who was recovering from an accident. This led me to invent the ‘I am OK’[a] button which, in turn, led to all the products and services which Alertacall provides today.
My concern with older people’s issues made me unusual in the realms of tech entrepreneurs.
Tech innovation and startups are usually the domain of younger people and younger people are, of course, usually focused on issues which affect them. Why wouldn’t they be?
We all care about what affects us personally – what pulls on our own heart strings – and the ill health, incapacity, loneliness and, above all, proximity to death that comes with old age is frankly a long way from the thoughts of most younger people.
This means the people in the sweet spot for creating technology are not sufficiently affected by these issues to come up with products and services. And so they don’t.
The consequences of ageing usually only start to become a factor in people’s lives when they enter their forties or fifties and begin seeing its effects on their own parents.
At this point, even though there may be many technologists among this generation (and some stats show that there are plenty of successful founders in their 40s), their focus will likely be on consolidating and growing existing business ideas rather than launching entirely new enterprises or going through the pain and risk involved with invention.
And so “agetech” is starved of technologists with the intrinsic desire to tackle issues around older people – because they’re working on other ideas, and simultaneously starved of people with the staying power to work on something until it comes good, which can take decades.
This is one reason why, although the potential applications for agetech are enormous, the amount of new products coming to market is limited – and they’re nearly all derivative, another panic button, another sensor. There’s progress, but it still looks a lot like it did 20 years ago.
In fact, it’s taken me 20 years just to get people to start buying into the simple idea that daily contact with older people (when supported with the right technology) might help us detect their changing needs more easily, reduce isolation, improve operating efficiencies – and that it could also support social prescribing, medication compliance and hospital discharge.
The same is true on the commissioning side too. How many driven technologists do you see working in housing, health and social care? And, how many of those have been personally affected by ageing issues to the extent they make it their life’s work to do something about it?
Yes, there are many great people doing solid work, but that’s not the same as being intrinsically compelled by the confluence of a) having a personal passion because of something which has affected you directly b) having stacks of energy and time to keep pushing until the idea comes good c) having a passionate interest in developing or commissioning tech.
Which begs the question, what can we do about it?
Well, we can’t make people interested in something they’re not, but perhaps if we lived in a society where the needs of older people were more actively discussed with younger people it might sow a few more seeds amongst the founders of tomorrow.
And perhaps, if more younger people were actively engaged in the care of older people, it might help inspire invention. But of course these are not overnight fixes.
Perhaps a more practical starting point for today would be to make sure that the systems used to evaluate and commission technology in the public sector are fit for purpose, then at least those rare outliers working in agetech might stand some chance of having their innovation make an impact. In short, can we better protect the few saplings we do have?
How we do this will be the subject of my next article.
Now we have established one of the core reasons why agetech lacks inventors and founder entrepreneurs, we can begin to explore the brutality of the public sector procurement those founders are met with.
For more articles in this series on Public Sector Technology Adoption see
Public Tech (Part 1): Why innovation & agetech adoption is so slow
Public Tech (Part 2): 5 x Critical factors to consider when commissioning innovation
Public Tech (Part 3): The three funding truths – that block innovation
Public Tech (Part 4): Treating our tech adoption sickness with a “PILL”
Public Tech (Part 5): Why chronic sickness is inevitable without “The PILL”