Innovation in the longevity economy is on the rise. New platforms, applications, diagnostics, portals, wearable devices, dashboards, alerts based on artificial intelligence. From the outside, it appears reassuring: healthcare is finally becoming “modern,” “digital,” and “data-driven.”
On the inside, from the perspective of someone who accompanies an elderly relative with progressive loss of physical or cognitive functions, the situation is quite different.
What I have observed is not a lack of innovation, but a profound incompatibility between what is being built and what is actually necessary when cognition declines, autonomy becomes fragile, and responsibility silently shifts from the individual to the family.
In this article, I present a wish list that was not born solely from theory or from the questions I encounter in my research on strategy and innovation in the longevity space, but from the gaps I am facing in lived experience over the past few months.
The paradox of digital fragmentation
Healthcare providers increasingly rely on digital tools: hospital portals, diagnostic platforms, prescription applications, appointment scheduling systems, insurance interfaces. Each of them may be well designed in isolation. Taken together, they form a true obstacle course.
For an average adult, navigating this ecosystem already requires time and digital confidence. For an older person on the path toward memory loss, it is simply impossible.
The paradox is striking: digitalization promises efficiency and empowerment, but in practice it increases cognitive burden precisely where capacity is diminishing. Passwords are forgotten, notifications are missed, results are scattered across platforms that do not communicate with one another. Integration is simply left to families, every household fends for itself.
From a strategic point of view, this is not a technological failure, but a business model choice: value is created locally, while coordination costs are externalized to users.
Here, the opportunity for innovation is not another application. What is needed is a unifying layer: services that aggregate, simplify, and organize interactions among providers, designed explicitly for cognitive decline and for shared family use. Value, meaning what we will actually be willing to pay for, is created not by more features, but by fewer decisions, fewer logins, fewer points of failure.
Knowing without understanding
Healthcare systems now provide information more quickly than ever. Test results arrive instantly. Reports are shared digitally. Data is abundant.
But information is not understanding.
Families are often left to interpret results without context, without prioritization, without guidance. Is it urgent? Is it expected? What has changed? What truly requires action?
For those accompanying an elderly relative, this gap creates continuous anxiety. Silence is interpreted as risk. Complexity disguises itself as transparency.
This gap is not exclusive to healthcare. Financial services, pensions, insurance, and even housing decisions increasingly confront an aging population with complex and high-risk information precisely at a moment when cognitive burden should be minimized.
This business opportunity lies in interpretation, not in the generation of data: services that translate information into trajectories, trade-offs, and clear next steps; that distinguish signal from noise; that provide reassurance as a legitimate outcome. Because in the longevity economy, emotional clarity is not a superfluous benefit; it is fundamental value creation.
Lack of coordination and the timing problem
Healthcare is organized around specialties, institutions, and episodes. Aging is lived as a continuous journey.
No single actor holds the entire story. As memory fades, the individual’s ability to coordinate his or her own life, medical, financial, administrative, disappears. Families intervene informally, without preparation and often too late, when the gaps have already accumulated.
This is not merely a failure of coordination; it is a failure of timing. Support typically begins at the moment of crisis, rather than at the first signs of cognitive or functional decline.
From a strategic perspective, many services related to longevity are designed as reactive interventions rather than anticipatory systems.
The opportunity for innovation is twofold: first, to recognize coordination as a primary service layer across all sectors, whether healthcare, finance, housing, or care; second, to intervene earlier, when autonomy is still largely intact. Business models that are activated before crisis, at diagnosis, at the onset of decline, or ideally preventively, can preserve independence for much longer and drastically reduce downstream costs.
A final wish: innovation for living independently, not just longer
Across Europe and beyond, the declared objective is clear: people should age and live independently, in their own homes, for as long as possible.
But, forgive my frankness, independence is not sustained by good intentions alone.
It requires systems that compensate for memory decline, reduced energy, and fragmented attention. It requires services that integrate healthcare, financial decisions, housing adaptations, and the logistics of everyday life into coherent pathways. It requires innovation that treats cognitive decline as a central design constraint, not as an inconvenient exception.
If the longevity economy truly aims to support a long independent life, then innovation must intensify, not only technologically, but also strategically and structurally.
The companies that solve these issues will not merely make money. They will earn the gratitude of millions of daughters and sons who, at this very moment, are doing what they can with inadequate tools.
It is time to build what we truly need!
Silvia Almeida, Professor at CATÓLICA-LISBON