There is a lot of money and energy pouring into healthtech and agetech right now, and most of it is good. But look at who it’s actually built for.
One lane is built around the care recipient. Their safety, their vitals, their fall risk. The other lane is built for the provider. Operations, risk, billing, coding. Both are necessary. Both are getting funded.
But there’s a third person in this equation, and almost nobody is building for them. The caregiver. Which is exactly why caretech for family caregivers is still so far behind.
This week, we’re getting into what that gap actually costs families.
Hot take this week:
We've wired up the patient, we've wired up the system, and we've somehow skipped the person holding those wires together.
This Saturday, september 5th, on Aging Together // Unfiltered
Nobody’s Selling Peace of Mind: Why Care Tech Skips Family Caregivers with Meghan Phelan, owner of Granny Nannies of South Florida, with eighteen years in elder care, an Alzheimer’s Association community educator, and someone who spends her days testing whether the technology families are being sold actually works in their homes.
two lanes, three people
Ask a caregiver what they need, and they won’t describe a device. They’ll describe a feeling: knowing that mom isn’t lying on the bathroom floor while they’re getting the kids out the door.
That’s a product requirement. It just isn’t one most companies are designing against.
I break elder-focused technology into three buckets.
Healthtech: wearables and anything tracking vitals, sleep, heart rate, falls.
Agetech: provider-side tools and smart-home systems that make functioning at home easier.
Caretech: the bucket I’ve gotten most passionate about, where the technology is built for the family caregiver themselves.
The first two buckets are crowded. The third is nearly empty.
Meghan has spent eighteen years watching this market from the inside as an agency owner and now working with a remote monitoring platform she brings into clients’ homes. Her read on where we are is not gentle.
"We are like in the Flintstone age for senior care in technology."
And she isn’t saying that as an outsider throwing stones. She’s saying it while actively selling and installing this stuff.
Why the caregiver is the most vulnerable person in the equation
Here’s the part the market keeps missing. The caregiver is usually the one who breaks first, and there’s no dashboard tracking that.
Meghan puts it plainly: what the adult child wants is peace of mind. Not features. Not a data export. Peace of mind, at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, while they’re packing lunches and answering work emails and running the mental inventory of everything that could have gone wrong overnight.
"Our brain space is at capacity."
The sandwich generation is carrying jobs, kids, and parents at the same time. Every unanswered question — did she get up, did she eat, has the pattern changed — occupies space that was already spoken for. Technology that gives that space back is caretech. Technology that adds one more login, one more alert to interpret, one more thing to manage, is just more weight.
We get into what “simple enough to actually help” looks like in the episode. Meghan’s version of it is shorter than you’d expect.
They want the lifeline. They're afraid of the machine.
Then there’s the other side of the resistance, and it’s not the side most people assume.
Older adults are not refusing technology because they don’t see the point. Many of them want it. What stops them is that the thing in front of them is genuinely hard to use: small buttons, unfamiliar language, an interface designed by people who never watched an 85-year-old try to work it.
"They want the lifelines, they want the technology, but there's so much better technology now, and they're afraid of it."
And it goes deeper than usability. Meghan describes it as physical, emotional, and psychological all at once. How am I going to talk to a machine? Is it recording me? Who’s watching? That’s not stubbornness. That’s a reasonable set of questions nobody has bothered to answer for them.
It gets harder still for families who don’t speak English as a first language, and for anyone living with cognitive impairment — where you’re not just teaching a new tool, you’re asking someone to understand why it exists, how it works, and why they need it, all at once.
Meghan has a specific approach for getting past that resistance, and it doesn’t involve talking about safety at all. I’ll let her explain it in tomorrow’s episode, because it works, and because it reframes the entire conversation you may have been losing with your parent for months.
The paradox nobody predicted
Now here’s the thing that genuinely surprised me.
The same population that says I’m not talking to a machine is producing feedback that runs in the exact opposite direction. When Meghan describes the testimonials coming back from a year of using this technology with clients, the loudest one isn’t about falls or vitals at all.
It’s about companionship.
We sit with that contradiction for a while in the episode — what it says about isolation, what it says about what older adults are actually missing, and what it means that the feature nobody was buying it for is the one they love.
The math families get wrong about waiting
The last thread is money, because eventually every one of these conversations becomes a money conversation.
Meghan’s read on the biggest gap in the market isn’t technological at all. It’s financial. Families wait too long to bring in help because waiting feels like saving.
"They think they save money in the beginning by withholding care, burning themselves out."
Then something catastrophic happens, and the cost of care rockets past what they could have afforded to spend gradually. Fifteen hours a week becomes sixty. A fall becomes a hospitalization becomes a rehab stay becomes a level of care nobody planned for.
When we’re talking about diseases that can run ten to twenty years, that math matters enormously. Care implemented early and part-time is preventative care. Care implemented after the crisis is damage control, priced accordingly.
(If you missed it, this connects directly to our earlier conversation on keeping care in the home and out of the hospital.)
The caregiver takeaway
Two things you can use this week, both straight from Meghan.
First: change who the technology is for. If you’ve been asking your parent to accept a monitoring system for their safety, you’ve been having the wrong conversation. Try it as a request instead of a precaution: I need this for me, so I can stop worrying. Most parents will do for their kids what they’d never do for themselves.
Second: ask the question that cuts through the sales pitch. Before you buy anything, find someone in elder care who has no stake in your decision and ask them directly: would you use this for your own parent? Not what’s cheapest. Not what’s flashiest. Not what your neighbor bought. That single question will tell you more than an hour of product research, because most professionals recommend a much shorter list for their own families than they do for yours.
And underneath both: start building the care ecosystem before you need it. Unpaid family, paid respite, adult day programs, tech at home, community services. We build a village for raising children — a responsibility we plan for. We build almost nothing for caring for our parents, which is the one nobody plans for at all.
The full conversation with Meghan Phelan drops tomorrow morning. Follow aging together // unfiltered wherever you listen or watch so it lands straight in your feed.
Want more conversations like this one? Tune in to the Aging Together Unfiltered podcast, and follow along on Instagram and LinkedIn. If this resonated, share it with another caregiver who needs to read it.
At Aging Together, we’re dedicated to helping you navigate aging together — whether you’re an older adult planning ahead, a caregiver seeking support, or simply someone who wants to understand the aging process. I hope you’ll join us on this journey.