1. As care homes face increasing pressure to improve resident safety while managing limited team resources, how do you see smart sensor technology redefining traditional fall prevention strategies?
The numbers are staggering when you actually stop and look at them. Care home residents in the UK experience an estimated 4,438 falls every day1, and they're around three times more likely to fall than older people living at home2. For decades, the response has been pull-cords or a pear push lead by the bed, pressure mats on the floor, and teams doing physical rounds through the night. All reactive interventions. A resident has to be near a device to use it, and by the time a carer opens the door during a night round, a fall may have already happened.
Smart sensor technology changes the entire sequence. The sensor is always on; it doesn't require the resident to do anything, and it identifies movement before anyone has pressed a button or pulled a cord. At Nesoddtunet Care Home3 outside Oslo, the project manager highlighted the issues with the old setup: if someone fell too far from the pull cord, they couldn’t call for help, and once an employee left the room, there was simply no way to know what was happening in there. That blind spot is where the real risk has always been.
That's where fall management tools play a part. They can work in many ways, for example, a sensor that sits in the resident's room, passively monitoring 24 hours a day, uses infrared to detect movement and changes in activity – all without intrusive cameras – and alerts the care team automatically of increased risk or a possible fall. If someone sits up in bed or leaves their room at an unusual hour, teams can check in digitally through an anonymised image, rather than opening the door. It's designed to eliminate that blind spot.
2. From your perspective, what are the key limitations of legacy fall prevention approaches that smart sensors are uniquely positioned to overcome?
The fundamental problem is that legacy approaches rely on a resident or carer to raise the alarm, and can instil unhelpful practises. For example, pressure mats – which go off every time someone puts a foot on the floor, whether anything is wrong or not – train teams to treat alerts as background noise. And doing physical rounds at night often wakes residents up, which ironically raises the risk of confusion and falls, particularly for people living with dementia. They also generate little meaningful data over time for teams to learn from, and the alerts they do raise come through noisy, disruptive nurse call systems. In contrast, modern technologies send subtle, actionable notifications directly to care teams' handheld devices, allowing teams to respond without disturbing the wider home and, over time, to build a richer picture of each resident's patterns.
Legacy systems only ever tell you what, or when, something might have happened – never why. I often think about a story from Foxhunters Care Home4 in Wales, where a resident living with dementia was regularly found on the floor at night. Everyone assumed she was falling, so the routine was to call an ambulance. When a sensor was installed, the care team could actually see the sequence of events. She was gently lowering herself to the floor every night, on purpose. It wasn't a fall at all. That one insight changed her entire care plan and stopped a cycle of unnecessary emergency calls. You don't get that kind of understanding from a pressure mat!
3. Smart sensors enable continuous, non-intrusive monitoring. How does this shift from reactive to proactive care models help provide a better workflow for teams?
It changes the basis of decisions. Instead of acting on a single moment, you're looking at patterns. At Skedsmotun Care Centre5 in Norway, the unit manager told us that decisions about residents were historically based on subjective observations, assumptions, and sometimes gut feelings. However, after piloting one of our smart sensor tools, which visualises activity data from the sensors over time, they now have something objective to work from.
One example she shared involved a resident who was becoming increasingly unsettled. By using smart sensors, the care team could identify periods of activity and restlessness overnight, enabling them to adjust routines and follow up in a more informed way. By reviewing activity patterns over time, they could see whether the changes they had made had a stabilising effect, rather than relying on assumptions or isolated observations. In other cases, sensor data highlighted noticeable changes in night-time behaviour, such as increased bathroom visits, prompting teams to adjust their workflows and check in with residents sooner.
This is particularly important for residents who are unable to clearly communicate how they are feeling or even how they slept, such as people living with advanced dementia. At Skedsmotun, the care team now uses our system every morning to cross-reference the night-shift report with the sensor activity records, in order to flag any residents who may require follow-up or additional support – it has become a natural part of handover and day-to-day care planning.
4. With the growing adoption of digital supervision tools, how can care providers ensure that technology enhances, not replaces, the human element of caregiving?
I get asked this a lot, and I'm glad people raise it. Nobody wants to replace human care with a screen. But I've spent enough time in care homes to know that teams spend a huge amount of their time on tasks that don't involve meaningful contact with residents: walking corridors, clearing false alarms, and doing routine checks on people who are sleeping soundly. If technology handles that monitoring, it frees people up for the interactions that actually matter.
At Nesoddtunet Care Home outside Oslo, the project manager was clear that technology should support the care work, not replace it. What they've found is that digital checks actually improve collaboration between team members, because everyone has a shared view of what's happening across the home. Team members ask for help more readily, and work across departments more. They spend less time on unnecessary checks, and more time on direct engagement with residents. That's what we're aiming for.
Crucially, these systems also provide richer data and objective insights into resident routines and behaviours, enhancing teams’ understanding of individual needs and creating greater opportunity to deliver truly personalised, person-centred care.
5. In what ways can analytics derived from sensor data help in identifying high-risk residents and preventing falls before they occur?
A single alert that someone has left their bed at 2 am is useful in the moment. But when care teams can see how movement typically builds up over time – for example, repeated restlessness, pacing or frequent transitions during the night – they begin to understand the patterns that often precede a fall or near-fall. With sensor data, you're no longer reacting to a moment; you're reading a trajectory, which can help identify and prevent a fall before it occurs.
At Skedsmotun, their registered nurse described our smart sensor as primarily a tool for understanding what happens at night, when residents are least visible. They use it in their dementia units every morning, alongside the night-shift handover, cross-referencing the data with care team observations. This helps them learn which types of movement tend to lead to incidents for individual residents, and to adjust routines and follow-up in a more targeted way. In the other unit, they use the smart sensor insights for deeper analysis – for example, mapping a new resident's routines as quickly as possible, so the team can tailor their care from the very beginning.
6. Privacy and dignity are essential in elderly care. How can smart sensor solutions strike the right balance between effective monitoring and respecting residents' autonomy?
This is usually the first thing families ask about. People hear "monitoring" and picture cameras in bedrooms, which is completely understandable. So we always start by explaining what our sensors actually do. It uses infrared, not video, so what you see is more like an anonymised silhouette. You can tell if someone is in bed, standing, or on the floor, but you can't identify who they are.
At Herne Bay Manor6, every single resident gave consent and chose to use the system including those who are fully independent. That surprised a few people, but the reassurance it gives to families was the deciding factor for most. Feedback we hear consistently is that within a week or two, residents stop noticing it's there – it just becomes part of the room. There's a practical benefit too: because team members don't need to physically enter rooms at night as often, residents sleep better. We’ve had reports that residents have experienced better sleep, which in turn improves residents’ mood, and supports greater independence during the day.
We also always make sure we involve residents before installation and activation, ensuring they fully understand the system and have a genuine choice in whether to use it.
7. What role does team training and change management play in ensuring the successful implementation and long-term adoption of these technologies?
The manager at Hurum Care Centre7 in Norway said something that really stuck with me: “introducing new technology is the easy part, but changing the way people work is the difficult bit”. You can install sensors in every room, but if the care team doesn't trust them or doesn't know how to act on what they're being told, you haven't changed anything.
At Hurum, they were very deliberate. The home opened in 2021, and digital checks weren't fully operational until December 2024. They took it step-by-step, and that patience paid off. The same kind of thinking worked at Nesoddtunet, where they rolled out building-by-building with super users supporting each team. With new technology, you need to give people space to make mistakes and adjust. When that groundwork is there, the results come. Hurum has now been able to free up two full staff members during the night shift – as a result of the team reorganising around our technology and working more efficiently together. That matters in a sector where it's getting harder to recruit people every year.
8. What measurable impact have smart sensor deployments shown in terms of reducing hospital admissions and easing the burden on broader healthcare systems?
Falls cost the NHS more than £2.3 billion a year and remain one of the leading causes of hospital admission for people over 658. When care teams have better visibility into what’s happening around residents, fewer situations need to escalate. That can mean fewer ambulance call outs, fewer disruptive hospital admissions, and less recovery time for residents.
When implemented well, sensor technology can help care teams notice changes earlier, understand patterns of movement and activity, and respond in a more timely and proportionate way. For care home residents, avoiding an unnecessary hospital stay means staying confident, keeping their routines, and remaining in familiar surroundings with people they know. At the end of the day, that’s what all of this is for – sensor technology is simply one way we can help care teams get there.
Footnotes:
- https://immedicare.co.uk/why-4438-daily-falls-in-uk-care-homes-deserve-our-attention/
- https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/falls-prevention-programme-effective-care-homes/
- https://www.sensio.com/customer-stories/nesoddtunet
- https://www.sensio.com/customer-stories/foxhunters
- https://www.sensio.com/customer-stories/skedsmotun
- https://carehomemagazine.co.uk/sensio-in-action/
- https://www.sensio.com/customer-stories/hurum
- https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/clinical-policy/older-people/frailty/frailty-resources/#:~:text=Falls%20resources,a%20greater%20risk%20of%20death
