What actually counts as “age-tech”?

“Age-tech” covers a wide range of tools, and it’s worth being specific rather than treating it as one category. It includes fall detection and remote monitoring systems, medication management tools, mobility and exercise technology, cognitive stimulation apps, and communication or companion technology — a category that now includes voice AI. Some of these categories have real evidence behind them; others are much newer and less studied. This article focuses on adoption trends and barriers across the category broadly — a closer look at the evidence behind specific categories is a separate piece of work.

The barriers that block adoption — from real Canadian pilots, not theory

It’s easy to assume the main barrier to more technology in long-term care is the technology itself — that it isn’t good enough yet. Real Canadian implementation research tells a different story.

A 2025 case study published in Digital Health examined two real technology pilots in Canadian long-term care homes: a Telepresence Robot project across five homes in Vancouver, letting families connect with residents remotely, and MouvMat, an interactive exercise-gaming surface piloted in Ontario homes. Both ran into strikingly similar obstacles:

  • Staff shortages and turnover. Both projects found this was the most consistent barrier — not a lack of interest in the technology, but a lack of staff with the time and continuity to support it.
  • Infrastructure limitations, including unstable internet — inside the building itself. This wasn’t just a rural connectivity problem; it showed up in metropolitan homes too.
  • Individual resident needs. Residents’ cognitive and physical differences meant a one-size-fits-all rollout rarely worked as planned.
  • Shifting rules mid-project. Changing COVID-19 protocols and new provincial legislation altered what was even feasible partway through.

A separate, earlier body of work reinforces this. A 2022 national dialogue — convening citizen panels and long-term care system leaders across Canada, led by researchers at McMaster University, AGE-WELL, and the Bruyère Research Institute — prioritized building national standards and guidelines, using co-design with residents and families from the start, and creating funding models flexible enough to support genuine rapid-learning and iteration. None of those priorities are about the technology being smarter. They’re about the system around it being ready.

Canada’s digital divide is real, and it’s narrowing unevenly

Two structural facts are worth knowing before assuming every resident (or every home) is equally ready for new technology.

Digital literacy is genuinely improving, but not evenly. Statistics Canada reports that internet use among Canadians 65 and older reached 82.6% by 2022, up meaningfully from 2020. But that figure drops to about 72% for people 75 and older — exactly the age range most likely to be living in long-term care. The National Institute on Ageing frames this plainly: Canada’s population aged 85+ is projected to nearly triple by 2046, and past efforts to close the digital skills gap for this group have largely fallen short, particularly for the most vulnerable.

Connectivity itself is still unequal. According to a 2023 federal auditor general’s report, roughly 99% of urban households have access to high-speed internet meeting the national 50/10 Mbps standard, compared to only about 46% of rural households. For homes in smaller or remote communities, this isn’t an abstract concern — it can determine whether a given technology works at all.

What helped, according to the people who tried it

The 2025 case study above didn’t just document what went wrong — the research teams behind the Telepresence Robot and MouvMat projects also documented what worked, and it points in a consistent direction: implementation, not the product itself, is where the real work happens.

Both teams found success came from having staff champions on-site to support day-to-day use, flexible scheduling that worked around real staffing constraints rather than an idealized one, co-design with residents and families — including presenting to family councils and placing consent forms where families would actually see them — and simple acknowledgment of staff effort, from newsletters highlighting successes to straightforward recognition. None of that is exotic. It’s the unglamorous, structural work that determines whether a good idea on paper becomes something that actually runs on a Tuesday afternoon with two staff short.

Who’s actually driving age-tech in Canada

Two organizations anchor most of the credible activity in this space, and it’s worth knowing what each one does.

AGE-WELL is Canada’s federally funded technology-and-aging research network, bringing together more than 250 researchers across 42 universities and research centres, alongside close to 400 industry, government, and non-profit partners. It funds and coordinates research rather than selling anything itself.

CABHI (the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation), powered by Baycrest, plays a different role: it funds and supports individual innovators — from early-stage startups to established organizations — as they develop, test, and validate technology, often by connecting them directly with real healthcare organizations for real-world testing. Both organizations are genuinely useful entry points for understanding what’s being tested in Canada right now, separate from any individual vendor’s own marketing.

What operators should ask before adopting anything new

Based on what the research above actually found useful, the highest-value questions aren’t about features:

  • Who will be the day-to-day champion for this, and what happens if that person leaves? (Staff turnover was the single most consistent barrier found in real Canadian pilots.)
  • What happens if our internet connection is unreliable — does the technology have a meaningful fallback, or does it simply stop working?
  • Was this tested with residents who have needs similar to ours, including cognitive and physical variation — or with a narrower, healthier population?
  • What independent evidence exists, separate from the vendor’s own data? Vendor claims are claims, not findings, regardless of how confidently they’re presented.
  • Who at the home will actually be trained, and is that training built into the rollout or treated as an afterthought?

What this article doesn’t settle

  • The 2025 implementation case study covered two technology types, in metropolitan BC and Ontario homes only. Rural long-term care settings, and other categories of technology entirely, weren’t part of that research.
  • This article doesn’t grade the evidence behind specific age-tech categories — fall detection, remote monitoring, and companion technology all have different, separately evidenced track records that deserve their own honest treatment.
  • Digital literacy and connectivity statistics describe the general older-adult population, not long-term care residents specifically, who tend to be older and have more complex needs than the survey samples behind these numbers.
  • This isn’t a review of privacy or consent practices in senior care technology — a real and separate consideration, covered in its own dedicated piece on this site.

What this means in practice

For operators: the evidence here argues for spending as much planning effort on staffing, training, and connectivity as on the technology purchase itself — the projects that struggled didn’t struggle because the technology failed, they struggled because the system around it wasn’t ready.

For families: if a home tells you they’ve adopted new technology, a fair follow-up question is how it’s actually being used day to day, and by whom — not just whether it exists in the building.