How do older adults and AgeTech industries imagine future ageing-technology? Miguel Gomez-Hernandez, researcher at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University who visited CenSof this summer, examines the debates around smart-home technology futures focused on trust, repair, and fall risks.
There’s a common narrative driving much of the technology designed “for” older people. Industry imagines an ageing population growing rapidly, accompanied by a shortage of caregivers.
In response, the industry predicts a future where older adults will be increasingly surrounded and cared for by smart systems, assistive robots, companion devices, surveillance tools, and AI-powered platforms designed to monitor and manage daily life.
This vision is often driven by urgency: ageing is framed as a demographic crisis that must be solved through technological innovation.
These assertions are based on my interviews with industry experts, drawing on comic scenarios, after a review of industry reports, and published here. But older adults don’t necessarily see their futures this way as my research with older adults in Melbourne demonstrate.
Both methods form the basis of my PhD based at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University (Australia) with Prof. Sarah Pink as lead supervisor.
In my household visits with older adults – drawing on video-tours and GenAI scenarios – I found rich, nuanced reflections that resist this binary framing of technology as either salvation or intrusion. Most older people I met do not simply accept or reject technology. Instead, their relationship to it is shaped by trust, repair, and anxieties. These are not binary positions – they exist on a spectrum, shaped by personal histories, imaginations, and priorities, and broader social concerns.
Trust in technologies
One recurring theme is trust. Older adults are not passive users waiting for technology to “assist” them. The idea of being constantly monitored or managed by machines, without choice or flexibility, raises serious questions about trust.
Many express concern over loss of agency, privacy, or being forced to adapt to systems they didn’t ask for. This relation to mistrust and trust is about feeling confidence, control, and security in their future.
Who will repair breakages?
Interestingly, participants also expressed fears about the possible breakage of technology, that don’t usually appear in tech-centred companies, while enacting and showing me ways they would repair them.
Many questioned what happens when these technologies break down, asking who will maintain the technologies when they inevitably break? How will power outages or natural disasters impact the future smart home – without reliable backup systems – where older adults are envisaged to live independently?
These questions reveal a broader awareness of and concern around the fragility of technology – a recognition that the future is not just a place of progress, but also of vulnerability that we need to embrace.
Risk of falls
And then there is the question of the anxieties over the risk of future falls —an ever-present fear in later life. More than just a physical and metrified event followed by growing frailty as typically depicted through biomedical perspectives, it represents a turning point: the moment that can lead to institutionalisation, a move to a new home, or the loss of independence.
While technology companies monitor and quantify older people’s lives offering solutions such as sensors, alarms, or the removal of carpets and stairs to prevent risks, older adults are reluctant to instrumentalise fall risks since falls are an inevitable and pervasive hazard. They imagine fall risks as entangled with economic constraints, housing insecurity, cultural differences, and home objects and pets, often anticipating transitions with ambivalence or anxiety.
Design with care
My research investigates dominant industry and older adults’ visions, and urges us to take older adults’ imaginations seriously. They are not merely end-users or “beneficiaries” of innovation. They are experts in their own lives, actively imagining and shaping their own futures.
If we truly want to design inclusive futures for older adults, we must listen more closely and participate in the lives of older adults – not just to design a set of design requirements, but to how they resist and envision with hope the years to come.
As my PhD dissertation is expected to be submitted in January 2026, I hope to report back to my participants, strengthen collaborations with the AgeTech industry and researchers, and develop joint research around AgeTech futures with the ETLab, CenSoF, and more.
