Most aging-in-place tech is built for a person who will wear a button, allow a camera, and has an adult child on call. WanderCare is built for everyone that describes, and everyone it doesn't.
A safety system that goes dark when the internet drops isn't much of a safety system. We're designing a cellular and local-mesh backup so alerts can still go out during a storm, an outage, or an unpaid bill. It isn't built or tested yet, and until it is, alerts depend on the home's internet.
The standard model routes an emergency to a generic call center, then to a biological next-of-kin. For older adults outside conventional family structures, that chain fails at the first link. That includes LGBTQ+ older adults, who are more likely to live alone (25 percent of LGBT adults 65 and older, compared with 15 percent of straight and cisgender peers, Williams Institute 2023). WanderCare will alert the people the older adult picked, in the order they set, so the person who actually shows up is the one who gets the call.
Radar can notice a fall or a long stretch with no movement without seeing a face or a body. The kit has no cameras, in any room. The older adult decides what's watched and who's told, in writing, during a walkthrough of their home. We're planning a privacy dial and a physical off-switch that no one else can override: not a family member, not us, not a remote server. Data is never sold and never used to train models.
WanderCare is shaped by person-centered, trauma-informed (PCTI) care, an approach developed under federal ACL funding for serving older trauma survivors. Its founder, Michael Eisinger, was lead author of the Jewish Federations of North America's 2018 paper on training providers in it. That means consent, control, and dignity are design constraints, not afterthoughts: nothing is forced, surveillance is refused, and the person being cared for stays in charge of it.
A 2025 randomized trial in Canada found that adding passive home monitoring did not significantly reduce moves to higher levels of care after one year (Donelle et al., JMIR Aging 2025). We take that seriously rather than ignore it. WanderCare's thesis is that monitoring only matters if it reliably reaches a real person the older adult chose. We will never claim WanderCare improves clinical outcomes. It is a safety kit, not a medical device, and no system catches every fall.