It was January of 2026 in North Seattle, and my 86-year-old father was struggling to move around his house.
“I’m stumbling around here,” my 86-year-old father told a guest in his home this past January.
“Oooh, ooh, careful,” the guest replied.
“Yeah, I almost fell down.”
Meanwhile, I’m 5,000 miles away in Austria, unaware of any trouble until months later, when I read a transcript of the entire incident via
Sensi.ai: an always-on, AI-enabled microphone that’s been monitoring my father’s life for nearly a year. His coughs, toilet flushes, and even snippets of private conversations—Sensi records it all.
Sensi was first recommended as a free add-on to my dad’s care because, like
most older adults, he would like to spend the remainder of his life in his own home. Once a modest, single-story clapboard, it was yassified in the ’90s by a couple from Vegas, who added a second-story steam room and bidet, a feature that entertained our family cat. While these amenities never appealed to my father, he has embraced the carpeted staircase as his preferred exercise equipment—climbing them up and down on loop—even as his worsened gait has become an ongoing concern for his loved ones and caregivers over the past few years.
When my family first began fretting that he’d fall in 2024, I defended his choice to stay at home, which doubles as a well-kept shrine to my late mom, who died in 2019. “He should live however he wants,” I told a friend. “When I’m old, I’d like the right to fall down,” she replied. To reaffirm my stance, I also found studies confirming that older adults who move into nursing homes
experience steeper cognitive decline; plus, I was still haunted by the flickering, fluorescent institution that once housed my mom for a month.
Sensi’s promise was tantalizing: A little white box would sit under a table or chair and silently monitor for danger. It seemed like an easy way to help my dad preserve his independence and give me peace of mind from Europe.
But safety wasn’t the only consideration. My father has always been a private guy who’s kept his feelings squirreled away (unless the topic is fractals or philosophy). When I came out, it was hard to figure out how he really felt, and I eventually gave up trying to break down his walls, relying on surface conversations about the weather to connect. Usually, it was only a brief chat before he said “Here’s Mom” and passed the phone.
My dad was initially resistant to Sensi because of his own privacy concerns—who can blame him?—but after a little cajoling from my sister and me, he finally agreed to have the device installed. At some point, Sensi flagged my father as someone with a “possible high risk of falls” and began listening for words indicating he was unsteady on his feet. When Sensi’s microphone overheard him saying the word “fall,” it automatically sent the private exchange to his caregivers.
Weeks later, out of curiosity, I requested the transcripts of everything Sensi was recording in my father’s home. Reading his personal conversations, I suddenly felt like a spy, with the device as my silent conspirator. I’d pushed for the thing in the first place, but now I felt uneasy about it. My father, meanwhile, didn’t remember being told that Sensi was eavesdropping on his conversations.
Reading his own words back to him, I braced for the worst.
“So, what do you think?” I asked.
There was a moment of silence in which I could hear the blood swirling in my ears.
“Well,” he finally said, sounding on edge. “It’s pretty weird that it hears words.” He seemed baffled that anyone would deem his conversations worthy of transcription.
“But I guess it’s worth it,” he added, before changing the subject.
After my dad’s shrug of acceptance, I started digging into what I’d actually put in his house. Sensi, I learned, is one of a growing number of AI devices aimed at seniors:
Earzz and Ally Cares surveil care home residents for coughs, falls, and atypical movements, while Cherish Serenity—which looks like a stylish, retro home speaker—uses radar to detect when someone in a room has fallen or is slumped over. (The device can be bundled with AT&T for speedy emergency response.)
Unlike Alexa, these devices don’t wait for someone to say “help.” Instead, they begin recording after specific events: sounds like thuds, coughs, screams, and movements like falling off a bed. In Sensi’s case, the device doesn’t even tell the senior it’s recording, which helps explain my dad’s confusion.
Sensi’s algorithm, allegedly based on “1,000 years” of audio data, claims to identify deviations in a person’s usual routines. If you’ve got a new cough, are always in the bathroom, or are simply plodding around the house in a novel way, Sensi can apparently tell. But when I asked the company’s cofounder and CEO, Romi Gubes, how the algorithm was built, she said only that its models are “trained on anonymized datasets” stripped of “personally identifiable information.” She did not elaborate on exactly what those datasets contain or where they are pulled from.
Steve Kamau, a calm, soft-spoken coordinator at Husky Senior Care, the agency helping my dad with shopping and other household tasks, tells me that the device sometimes works exactly as it should. In one case, a senior fell down while trying to reach the toilet when no caregiver was around. Sensi caught both the sound of the impact and the man’s cries for help. Kamau called the client (who always kept his phone on him) and confirmed he’d fallen, then dispatched 911; the man was then helped off the floor. In another instance, he says, a client’s cough was caught early enough that it may have saved her from a more serious illness. (Sensi claims a 90 percent accuracy rate, with edge cases reviewed by a “human in the loop”; Kamau tells me the system has also mistaken a dropped remote for a fallen senior.)
Sensi also markets itself as a tool for tracking cognitive decline by identifying deviations in a patients’ “patterns in speech, tone, activity, and movement.” Ihab Hajjar, a neurologist who studies AI-based
dementia detection, is skeptical that the device can help with that. He says he’s seen clinical models flag 60 to 70 percent of patients as cognitively impaired when the true prevalence is closer to 10 or 15 percent. “I have not seen good evidence from any protocol of analysis that would make me feel comfortable as a clinician to recommend [devices like Sensi] to my patients,” he says. Sensi has not sought clearance for these claims from the US Food and Drug Administration, though Gubes says the company has initiated the process.
Still, Sensi has been able to raise an impressive
$100 million and claims to be used by 80 percent of the largest home care networks in North America. Its success comes at a time when the general public continues to be wary of nursing homes, which are also prohibitively expensive: A private room in a facility averages over $108,000 a year—around double the median income for households over 65—and nearly one in six residents end up depleting their savings entirely, spending down assets until they qualify for Medicaid.
It’s no surprise, then, that many older Americans try to stay in their homes for as long as possible—and take on the risks of doing so. For my dad, moving to an old-age home was a nonstarter: He considers the house an extension of himself. His choice to remain there aligns with what disability rights activist Robert Perske first articulated as the “dignity of risk,” which holds that the right to make choices—including risky ones—is essential to self-esteem and that smothering someone in safety can also strip them of personhood. Devices like Sensi promise to dissolve this tension, offering security without physical constraints and surveillance without institutional oversight.
But the company’s public-facing pitch to families differs from what its investor materials plainly state: The real customers here are the home care agencies, and Sensi claims that they can grow revenue and retain clients more effectively by using its services. One agency testimonial on Sensi’s website boasted 88 percent client growth and an 85 percent increase in billable hours after installing the company’s devices.
Reading through these testimonials, I find myself wondering if my dad’s physical safety is the ultimate goal here, or if he’s somehow being used to pad his agency’s bottom line. But perhaps relying on devices in lieu of workers is just the way the industry is moving: The caregiving economy is in crisis, exacerbated by
President Trump’s deportation machine. As the caregiver shortage deepens— over 9 million positions will need to be filled before 2031, by one estimate—devices like Sensi are poised to become a default, the baseline of care for an aging population. My dad has seen eight caregivers come and go over the past year, some of whom found new jobs and others who couldn’t handle the commute to his home.
Sensi, however, is now a constant—listening under the table for danger as my dad eats his tuna fish sandwiches.
A few months after the first incident, Sensi records my father again, vulnerable, telling someone he can’t walk and that he’s feeling “really limited.” I again have the feeling of being a spy, so I call Kamau to see if he thinks my father really understood the implications of accepting the omniscient device. “Your dad is his own decisionmaker, right?” he says.
I ask if he thinks most seniors understand what they’ve signed up for. “Somebody, at the end of the day, might have forgotten what was in the form,” he says, referring to the privacy agreement that clients sign. But most seniors “just take it for what it is and, for the most part, they even forget it’s there.” Others, he adds, resist the device for months, relenting only when their family’s fears override their own concerns: “There’s a resistance, until they just probably give in.”
Clara Berridge, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, thinks devices like Sensi make surveillance seem like a condition of care. “There might be consent, but it doesn’t necessarily make it an ethical process where choices are so constrained—where it’s like ‘We’re sending you to a nursing home or you get this,’” she says. “Presenting people with two undesirable options is really hard.”
Berridge also worries about how devices like Sensi erode a senior’s sense of home. What happens when the living room becomes a panopticon? Privacy, she says, is “autonomy, it’s self-protection, it’s emotional release. If I got bad news, I’m not going to go for a walk and blast Dolly Parton’s Heartbreak Express in front of everyone. I’m going to close my door. And that matters, too, to older adults.”
Privacy aside, there’s no doubt that AI devices for seniors are here to stay. AARP reports that 25 percent of caregivers are already remotely monitoring loved ones using apps, video platforms, wearables, and other systems—nearly
double the number of people using these technologies in 2020. Meanwhile, investors sank an estimated $10.7 billion into AI-powered health-tech startups in 2025, according to CrunchBase.
Are other caregivers down for this new tool? In the Reddit forum
r/AgingParents, one user asked if it would be ethical to use an AI-powered voice system to call a parent and check if they’ve taken their meds; several commenters called the idea creepy. “Hard pass for me,” one wrote. When I asked users in the r/CaregiverSupport community if any of them had tried Sensi, one person replied that she worried the device “would translate her [mother’s] heartbreak into a sterile notification.”
It reminded me of something Kamau told me as an aside: Sensi, despite being used for falls in my father’s case, can sense loneliness. One client, he says, hid his pain from his children but would tell a visiting friend, “Well, I’m watching more TV right now, I feel alone,” or “I don’t have many people coming to visit me. I feel a bit sad.” Sensi picked up on the man’s sadness and notified Kamau.
Maybe my dad puts on a brave face with me, but when he’s with others, the truth comes out. If he’s secretly lonely or depressed, I’d probably never know. Thankfully, there’s Sensi for that.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at
[email protected].
<small>Source: Wired</small>
