For years, much of the technology built for older adults has focused on one question: what happens when something goes wrong? A fall happens. An emergency alert is triggered. A caregiver is notified. A family member is called. These tools can be valuable, but they are built around a reactive model of care. Something has to happen before the technology steps in.
Matthew Costigan believes the industry can do more.
After spending the past six years working with remote monitoring technology, home care providers, and senior living communities across the United States, Costigan has seen how technology can support older adults in a different way. Instead of waiting for a crisis, it can help families and care providers understand what is happening earlier and support independence along the way.
For Matthew Costigan, this is not simply a technology question. It is a question about how people want to live as they age.
Independence Should Not Begin with an Emergency
Matthew ‘s interest in this area started long before he began working in health technology.
Growing up in Ireland, he watched both of his grandmothers experience aging in very different ways. One remained independent into her late eighties, living in her own home and maintaining her daily routines until a stroke eventually changed that. On his mother’s side, his other grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, giving Matthew a close view of the impact aging can have on an entire family.
What stayed with him was the importance of independence. When people can remain active, connected, and involved in their own lives, their quality of life can look very different. That experience later shaped the way Matthew viewed technology and care.
When he joined PacSana, he saw an opportunity to work on a different kind of solution. Rather than creating another system that only responds after an emergency, the goal was to use technology to support older adults more proactively while allowing them to remain engaged in their own aging journey.
That shift matters. Aging well is not only about preventing emergencies. It is also about helping someone continue to live their life with confidence and choice.
Moving from Reaction to Prevention
The idea of proactive care is becoming increasingly important as families look for ways to support aging parents without immediately taking away their independence.
For an adult child, there can be a difficult balance. They want to know that their parent is safe, but they also do not want that concern to turn into constant monitoring or make their parent feel incapable of managing their own life.
This is where technology has an opportunity to play a different role. The goal should not be to watch every movement or collect every possible piece of information. It should be to provide useful insight that can help families and care providers notice changes, understand needs, and respond earlier.
Matthew sees this as a move toward “insight without surveillance.” Technology should support independence, not quietly replace it.
That distinction is important because more technology does not automatically mean better care. The best solution may be the one that gives a family greater peace of mind while allowing an older adult to continue living with dignity and as much independence as possible.
Technology Only Works When People Trust It
There is another part of the shift that is easy to overlook. A piece of technology can be well designed and still fail if the people expected to use it do not understand it, trust it, or see how it fits into their daily work.
Matthew experienced this firsthand while helping build PacSana’s presence in the United States.
The home care industry is highly relationship driven. Agencies and care providers have spent years building trust with the families they serve. Introducing new technology into that environment requires more than a good product and a sales pitch.
Matthew Costigan’s approach was to spend time with agencies, understand their challenges, run smaller local pilots, and learn what worked in practice. That process took patience. In fact, one of the lessons he learned was that the market sometimes had to be educated before it could be sold to. When PacSana began having conversations in 2020, the industry was still figuring out what this type of technology could realistically offer. The early work was not always about closing a deal. Sometimes it was about helping people understand a new possibility.
That approach eventually helped PacSana earn a national partnership with Right at Home. After evaluating close to 100 technology companies, Right at Home narrowed the field to a smaller group for a formal process and ultimately selected PacSana as its partner. Today, the resulting RightAssist technology is live across more than 130 offices.
The numbers are meaningful, but the larger lesson is about adoption. Technology does not create change on its own. People do.
The Next Generation of Care Should Support Choice
The future of aging will not look the same for everyone.
Some people will want to remain in their own homes. Others will choose senior living. Some will need more support as their circumstances change. Technology should not make that decision for them. Instead, it can help create more options.
This is why Matthew sees aging in place and senior living as part of a wider conversation about choice. The question should not simply be where someone lives. It should be whether they have the support they need to live well wherever they are.
That also means technology needs to remain connected to the human side of care. A family researching care for an aging parent is not simply comparing features on a product page. They are often making a deeply personal decision about someone they love.
Care providers are dealing with people, not just data. And older adults are not problems that technology needs to solve. They are people who deserve to have a say in how they live.
A More Human Future for Care Technology
The next stage of senior care technology should be about getting ahead of problems without getting in the way of people’s lives.
That means looking beyond emergency response and asking what technology can do before a crisis occurs. It means finding ways to give families useful information without creating unnecessary surveillance. It means designing tools that care providers can actually adopt and use.
Most importantly, it means remembering why the technology exists in the first place. For Matthew Costigan, the answer is simple. It is about helping people maintain independence, dignity, and choice for as long as possible.
The technology will continue to change. New tools will emerge, and the ways care is delivered will continue to evolve. But the principle behind them should remain steady.
Good care should not begin when something goes wrong. It should begin with understanding what people need to live well, and using technology to help them get there.
