How AI is helping people monitor loved ones without invading their privacy
How AI is helping people monitor loved ones without invading their privacy
Publish Date: 2026-05-22 07:00:00
Source Domain: www.theglobeandmail.com
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Pontosense founder Alex Qi holds a Silver Shield monitoring device, which is powered by radar technology and AI algorithms.Jenna Marie Wakani/The Globe and Mail
For years, the trade-off in caring for aging loved ones has felt stark: safety or privacy, but rarely both. Families want reassurance that an elderly parent living alone hasn’t fallen, wandered or quietly slipped into distress. But the tools available – cameras, wearable trackers, constant check-ins – can feel intrusive at best and dehumanizing at worst. For older adults already grappling with a loss of independence, being watched can feel like a second erosion.
Today, a new wave of technology is helping Canadian companies reimagine elder care. For example, Pontosense is a Toronto-based company using AI-powered radar sensing to monitor movement without capturing any visual or audio data. Its system, called Silver Shield, tracks patterns – how someone moves through their home, how often they get up at night, whether something seems off – and flags anomalies that might signal danger. The pitch is simple: peace of mind, without surveillance.
“It’s not too different than Wi-Fi signals in your home,” says Alex Qi, CEO of Pontosense.
Essentially, Silver Shield is a radar that can be placed on the wall in the corner of any room. It uses wireless signals to detect people in that room and presents each of them as dots on a screen. It can’t detect what those people are doing exactly, but it can detect falls and pick up on heart rate, unstable gait and offer sleep analytics. Mr. Qi says much of the data is processed locally (“on the edge”), limiting what is sent to the cloud and reducing the risk of exposure. It’s also HIPAA-compliant (a U.S. standard for protecting sensitive health information); the company is audited every two weeks to ensure this.
“[Families] are worried about Big Brother, but the moment they see how the technology works, they’re like, ‘I get…
