AgeTech is booming. Startups across the space are innovating rapidly to create solutions that make aging easier for everyone — from healthcare wearables and smart home solutions, to social connection apps and innovations to support caregiving and caregivers themselves.
Part of this remarkable growth is fueled by a deep appetite for these solutions on the consumer side — older adults who are often, contrary to popular stereotypes, quite tech-savvy. In fact, on average, adults aged 50-plus own seven tech devices, and 66% see technology as a means for enriching their lives by making everyday tasks — and the process of aging itself — easier.
But despite this flourishing interest in AgeTech, actual adoption of new and innovative solutions often underperforms expectations. Startups discover that their products don’t resonate with their intended users; features go unused; growth plateaus or falls off despite promising initial traction. This can leave founders scratching their heads, wondering, “Where did I go wrong?”
Why AgeTech Solutions Often Fail
Underperformance can frequently be traced to the fact that older adults often find that a new product or service falls short of meeting their actual, lived needs. Evidence supports this: In 2025, 59% of older adults reported that they feel a lot of technology isn’t designed for them. Innovators in AgeTech might balk at such feedback — after all, of course an AgeTech solution is designed for older adults! Perhaps what’s really going on is that many of these products aren’t being designed with older adults.
Let’s take a look at a few common mistakes that cause AgeTech innovators to fail or miss the mark when they design solutions for older adults, instead of with them.
Assuming instead of investigating: AgeTech innovators are often inspired to create solutions by personal experiences with older adults in their own lives. This is a noble aspiration, but it can also lead them to believe that they understand the problem intimately when, in fact, their experience is limited (and quite possibly second-hand, at that). This can easily result in a mostly theoretical knowledge of what older adults “need,” and incorrect assumptions regarding what they want. And the data is clear — older adults are not a monolithic group, and tech adoption varies greatly across gender, age, and a variety of other factors.
Being solution-driven instead of user-driven: Innovators love to innovate. But from time to time, they can become so focused on “improving” the solution with the latest technological bells and whistles that they lose sight of the more fundamental question: Will this new feature actually help solve users’ problems more effectively? More importantly, do users want the bells and whistles? A fall detection wearable, for example, may perform its intended use reliably and admirably. But if users find them bulky or unattractive, or believe that they signal “I am frail” to others, they might be reluctant to wear them consistently — and may not be wearing them when it matters most.
Not including the end-user early and often: Challenges like arthritic fingers, low vision or hearing, or even lack of familiarity with colloquialisms can deeply impact the usability of an AgeTech product or service, but often, these types of issues are only discovered through actual user testing. Despite this, many startups fail to conduct meaningful real-world testing with their intended users until late in the development process or, worse, not at all. This is an especially critical mistake, as robust and frequent user feedback throughout the design process gives startups the ability to iterate, course-correct and avoid costly mistakes before development begins.
While all these are distinct issues, they boil down to one inherent problem: a lack of empathy for the older adult end user. So what can AgeTech innovators do to avoid this pitfall?
How Design Thinking Can Help
Enter: Design thinking. Design thinking, also known as human-centered design, is an approach to innovation that helps businesses understand their customer, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create empathy-driven solutions.
Extremely helpful for tackling complex or hard-to-define problems — like making aging easier for everyone — design thinking’s iterative process involves nurturing deep empathy for the end users’ needs and pain points, creating a multitude of relevant and innovative ideas, and adjusting and refining the best ideas in order to build solutions that people can and will use.
How It Works
While several different specific frameworks exist for design thinking, at its core, it is a methodology built upon empathy, ideation, and iteration. Not to be confused with a product development framework (i.e. Agile), design thinking is about exploring and defining the right problem and solution, rather than primarily the efficient execution and delivery of a product.
One of the most popular frameworks, and one often utilized by the AgeTech Collaborative™ Design Thinking Practice, is the 5-Stage Process. Well-suited for ideation workshops, co-creation sessions and discovery sprints, the process includes the following stages:
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Stage 1: Understand — Clarify the challenge by exploring who you’re designing for, what they truly need and why the problem matters. This stage focuses on user research, reframing assumptions and aligning around shared goals.
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Stage 2: Diverge — Generate a wide range of ideas without judgment. Creative prompts and structured brainstorming help teams uncover unexpected possibilities and think beyond the obvious.
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Stage 3: Converge — Prioritize the strongest ideas by evaluating what’s most desirable for users and feasible to build. This stage narrows the focus while keeping user needs at the center.
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Stage 4: Prototype — Bring ideas to life through quick, tangible mockups — like sketches, clickable demos or role-playing. These low-fidelity prototypes are built to learn, not to launch.
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Stage 5: Validate — Test your prototype with real users to gather feedback and identify what works — and what doesn’t. Use those insights to refine, adjust or rethink the solution before moving forward.
Throughout the process, iteration is a constant theme. As new insights and feedback emerge, teams refine, retest and pivot as needed in order to continuously improve the solution.
Design Thinking in Action Across the ATC Ecosystem
When AgeTech innovators take the time to deeply understand older adults' lived experiences and iterate with their input, the results speak for themselves. Across the AgeTech Collaborative, we’ve seen how design thinking helps turn promising concepts into impactful, user-ready solutions. And it's not just startups putting these methods to work — health systems, senior living communities and enterprises are also using human-centered design to co-create with the populations they serve, helping to make sure their solutions hit the mark and meet their audience’s actual, lived needs.
Here are two examples from within our ecosystem that show design thinking in action:
Case in Point #1: Amicus Brain + Yale School of Medicine
To design a better emergency department-to-home transition for people living with dementia, Amicus Brain (an ATC startup) partnered with Yale and LiveWell Dementia Specialists for a two-day design workshop. By engaging older adults and care partners directly — alongside clinicians and technologists — the team surfaced critical needs and co-developed a solution grounded in real-world challenges. The experience proved so valuable that the team published a report to share lessons learned and encourage others to adopt design thinking for inclusive healthcare innovation.
Case in Point #2: United Church Homes Parkvue Community
At Parkvue, UCH partnered with ATC’s design thinking team to explore how a $1,000 investment could spark resident joy and wellbeing. Through focus groups, a multi-day design sprint and follow-up workshops, residents—ranging in age from 70 to 92—and staff co-created solutions now being implemented, from musical programming and movement classes to pollinator-friendly gardens. UCH has since embedded this methodology into ongoing staff training to scale human-centered innovation across its communities.
These examples illustrate a critical truth in AgeTech innovation: When we take the time to immerse ourselves and truly understand the lived experiences of older adults, we unlock the insights that lead to more effective, relevant and lasting solutions.
Getting Started
Ready to integrate design thinking into your everyday work? Whether you're a startup founder, innovation lead at an enterprise, technology manager in senior living, or simply passionate about AgeTech, embracing a design thinking mindset can help you build smarter, more inclusive solutions for older adults. Here are a few quick tips to get you started:
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Lead with empathy. Whether you’re refining a product or brainstorming a new offering, start with curiosity and a desire to understand. Conduct interviews, surveys or informal conversations with real older adults to better empathize with their lived experience — and return to them often as your ideas evolve.
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Get inspired by friction. If a user gets confused or abandons a feature or service, that’s not failure — it’s insight. Look for the “why” behind the behavior to better understand the problem and find the right solution.
- Design with, not for. Older adults are experts in their own lives. Involve them as co-creators, not just as test subjects, and seek their feedback early and often. Use their input to iterate and make small, meaningful improvements as you go.
Want to dive deeper? If you’re looking to apply design thinking more intentionally — or at a larger scale — we’re here to help. Building on AARP’s decades of exclusive longevity research and subject matter expertise, the AgeTech Collaborative™ Design Thinking Practice works with our participants to create custom engagements that center innovation and problem-solving on the 50+ audience with contextual insights, deep empathy, and agility. Contact us to start a conversation and learn more about how we can collaborate to shape what's next in AgeTech.
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