How Technology Can Help Older People Stay Living at Home

Ireland’s older generations are living longer, which is absolutely bloody brilliant. But it poses new questions about how can we support the elderly to live at home for longer, particularly if they live alone. The HSE makes a considered effort to support older people to live in their own home with dignity and independence, for as long as possible. I’ve been working on this a lot for personal reasons and have found some stunning technology that can help elderly people live considerably safer at home, even alone if needs be.

I’m going to break this up into three sections:

1. Non-connected supports for elderly living alone
2. Connected Eco-systems for elderly living alone
3. Customised smart home for elderly living alone

Non-connected supports for elderly living alone

Not every family is comfortable with setting up large amounts of technology in a home. Nor do all elderly people living with another elderly person or alone always want invasive technology. For this reason, there are some very simple tech solutions and some you’ll even find in the local supermarket.

Motion sensor lights

I did a bit of a double take in my local Lidl just last week. They were selling these plugs with motion sensors on them. A genius little bit of tech when you connect it to a lamp.

The idea here is simple. At nighttime, when it’s dark and people are tired, the risk of an elderly person falling increases massively. This little sensor can detect motion and activate what ever is plugged into it. For example, a lamp.

This means you now have a light that turns on whenever someone is moving. This will significantly reduce the risk of a fall in the home at night.

There are various versions of this available, including versions with lights built in, available on Amazon.

TabTime smart medication dispenser

I’ve called this a smart medication dispenser, but it’s not actually smart; it’s clever. The TabTime medication dispenser is perhaps one of the gadgets that has most impressed me, and I mean that of all time.

The circular device has 28 spots for medication, but only one is open at any given time. The device has a timer built in alongside the medication tray being motorised. You set the dispenser to allow medication to be taken at set times daily, up to a maximum of 6 alarms per day. And I do mean alarms. The dispenser will beep rather annoyingly (in a good way) until the box is tipped over.

Ultimately, the idea here is to help vulnerable people, who struggle to manage their medication properly, in taking the correct doses at the correct intervals.

I’ve been blown away by how much this has improved my Mam’s medication taking. Incredible wee gadget. It’s available on Amazon and is one of those piece of tech that amazes people when I tell them about it.

Connected Eco-systems for elderly living alone

Moving towards smarter technology is critical as the elderly person’s ability to live along requires more supervision. There are three eco-systems I’ve found work incredibly well, and one connected device that just came onto the Irish market with a unique trick up its sleeve.

Alexa

We kind of take Amazon Alexa for granted these days, but they are incredibly powerful when it comes to supporting elderly people living alone, for a raft of reasons. First of all, you can set up “Drop In”. This means you can land into a room on a video call without the elderly person having to do anything. Great for a welfare check.

Next up is reminders for medication. This is a game changer for us. Particuarly because we also have a smart IR blaster that can control the TV. One great use case here is again on medication reminders. At medication time, Alexa controls the TV through the IR blaster, muting whatever is on. Then Alexa announces it’s time for medication, just before the TabTime box alarms. It’s a relatively simple solution despite sounding complex that is really effective.

Beyond these solutions, voice controls can be a fantastic way for elderly people to interact with their home, but it’s critical you train those actions as early as possible. Alexa can support with setting timers, calendar reminders, help with checking the time, saying the day and date and, I’ve found really importantly, play music – a nice alternative to the TV.

Aqara smarthome accessories

I’ve been testing Aqara devices for years and am increasingly impressed with how good they are. I’ve got everything from cameras and smart locks to sensors and smoke alarms.

What is impressive with Aqara is the larger eco-system of solutions you can dip into to build a solution that suits your needs. For example, we have an Aqara G3 Hub combined with an Aqara Door and Window sensor. This simple combination is fantastic if you are caring for someone who tends to wander at night. You can create customised rules that “If the door sensor opens at night”, “then play a recording”. The recording can be your own voice, reassuring someone everything is ok, but it’s late and best they go back to bed.

It’s important to check that you have a required hub for your smart home ecosystem. The G3 Hub naturally is a hub and lets most Aqara devices connect to it. But something like the motions sensors won’t work in their own, and require a hub.

Having cameras in the home can, naturally, be a divisive topic, though I would argue that some people will get to a stage living at home where cameras are an absolute requirement of living alone.

However, if you find you are a few steps back from cameras, motion and presence sensors are incredible; but what is the difference?

What is the difference between presence and motion sensors?

The core difference is what they detect and how they respond.

Motion sensors detect movement within their field of view. They’re constantly scanning for changes, like someone walking through a room, a pet crossing the space, even significant air movement in some cases. Once they stop detecting motion, they typically turn off after a preset delay. This means if you’re sitting still reading on your couch, most motion sensors will eventually decide the room is empty and trigger whatever automation you’ve set up, like turning off the lights.

Presence sensors go further as they detect that someone is actually in the space, even if they’re stationary. The technology varies but most common on the market use millimeter-wave radar that can pick up subtle movements like breathing or minor shifts in position. The practical result is that your lights stay on when you’re working at your desk or watching TV, rather than plunging you into darkness because you haven’t moved enough.

In my experience, this distinction matters most in spaces where you spend extended periods relatively still. My office setup used to have basic motion sensors, and I’d find myself waving my arms every fifteen minutes to keep the lights on during focused work sessions,not exactly ideal. Presence sensors solve this annoyance entirely.

The trade-off is cost and complexity. Motion sensors are cheap, widely available, and dead simple to set up. Presence sensors cost more and sometimes require fine-tuning to avoid false positives (like detecting activity through walls in adjacent rooms). For high-traffic areas like hallways or entryways, basic motion detection works perfectly fine. For living rooms, bedrooms, or workspaces where people actually spend time, presence detection becomes significantly more valuable.

And this is exactly how I’m using them.

Aqara Presence and Motion Sensors

I have an Aqara Presence Sensor set up in the living room that keeps a lamp turned on as long as my Mum is in there. Once she moves out of the room, it turns off to save on electricity. But it also turns back on once she returns, again reducing trip hazards. One important thing to remember here is that they use more power and as a result usually need to be plugged in.

In the hallway, an Aqara Motion Sensor will pick up on movements and activate lamps to ensure her walkways are well lit. These are battery operated and don’t need as much power at all.

There are several other ways I use the motions sensors, but I do have to admit they come into their own when combined with Home Assistant.

Eufy smarthome accessories

I’ve had Eufy accessories at my Mum’s house for years. They were some of the first accessories we installed; external battery operated cameras. They are super convenient with long battery lives, only needing to be charged every few months.

But even that got a little janky to manage so we hooked them up to some small solar panels. Job done. Never really had to worry about them again. If you are primarily looking for some external cameras, Eufy is a goto accessory. You can get this great value starter kit including a hub over on Amazon.

They do let themselves down a little in the sensors area, but are always expanding their eco-system.

Google Nest Cam Indoor (wired, 3rd gen)

This little camera has blown my mind. While Google does sometimes have a reputation for just retiring products, the new Nest Cam Indoor (wired, 3rd gen) is powered by Gemini AI. This means there’s a good chance it’s going to be backed for years to come.

This camera gives you everything you might expect from a camera. High quality, real time view of a remote location and the ability to speak down the camera. All good stuff.

But with Google plugged in you get some awesome extras. The camera recognises saved faces which is, alone, pretty cool. But the amazing thing is the Gemini-powered daily summaries. This will give you a run down of everything that happened throughout the day. When it comes to elder care, this means you can check and see if breakfast was had, the washing machine was put on and the dishwasher emptied.

I would imagine that this will continue to get better at describing scenes and hopefully get customisable. Because if you could train it to learn what an elderly person taking their medication looks like – that’s an amazing solution. But unfortunately, the Nest Cam Indoor (wired, 3rd gen) is, while exciting and interesting, still very early in the AI-powered journey.

Customised smart home for elderly living alone

Now, this is the advanced level solution, but once you get into it it’s addictive. It’s also easier to get into than you might think thanks to AI these days.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant is the alternative to a set eco-system, Apple HomeKit or Google Home. Home Assistant is open-source home automation software that runs locally on your own hardware, typically a Raspberry Pi, dedicated server or maybe an old computer. It connects practically every smart home device and service under one roof, regardless of manufacturer, giving you unified control and the ability to create automations across different ecosystems without being locked into any single vendor’s platform.

Think of it as the Swiss Army knife for smart homes: it speaks every protocol, integrates with thousands of devices, and keeps your data on your own network rather than in someone else’s cloud.

I started playing with Home Assistant in the past 12 months and couldn’t believe how powerful it is. It’s also fantastic being able to make different sensors and gadgets from different eco-systems work together. My Aqara motion sensor controlling my LIFX Beam lights – it’s beautiful.

But when it comes to elder care, the power of these automations go into the next level. It also makes the entire effort much more affordable. I do pay for Home Assistant Cloud for ease of access, but getting started is free. Another exciting part is once you get into ordering sensors from AliExpress. Your costs plummet as you find incredibly gadgets that feed you more and more information about the home you’re monitoring.

Home Assistant Automations: Brought to you by AI

Home Assistant has lets you make some incredible automations. I’ve connected WhatsApp to my Mum’s Home Assistant instance. This means that if someone walks into the bathroom and doesn’t come back out again in 20 minutes, a family group is sent a WhatsApp message to give a quick welfare check given that’s longer than expected and may be a fall event.

If the kitchen doesn’t sense motion within 10 minutes of the TabTime alarm going off, a WhatApp is sent to the family group warning that medication may have been missed.

Of course, you could do this with push notifications and skip over WhatApp completely. But the whole goal here is to get the notifications to my family group.

Now, not all of this is easy to automate and might even need some coding experience. But I’ve built it with no coding ability whatsoever. All thanks to AI. Yep, AI can code anything you just need to help with the building blocks. I would still say this is a rather advanced option, but what you can achieve for specific scenarios is incredible.

I’m looking to add a vibration sensor to the TabTime so we known when meds are taken, a pressure sensor to the bed so we know when Mum is up and lots lots more.

Overall, what has really shocked me in the past few months is just how much technolgy has improved my Mum’s quality of life at home. It’s improved our own peace of mind too. What’s really exciting is that we just got a new washing machine delivered and it says it’s smart. I’m looking forward to seeing if I can get that into Home Assistant too.

I’ll be coming back and updating this article from time to time. I’ve written it because I know there are countless others out there wondering how can they help an elderly relative living at home alone or with special needs. Feel free to reach out to me on social if you have specific questions because I really do believe this is an area technology has excelled in supporting the elderly staying in their homes for longer.