Most aging-in-place tech is built for a person who will wear a button, allow a camera, and has an adult child on call. WanderCare is built for everyone that describes — and everyone it doesn't.
A safety system that goes dark when the internet drops isn't a safety system. WanderCare processes on a local hub in the home and escalates over whatever path is up — home internet, cellular, or a local mesh between WanderVerse nodes. A storm, an outage, or an unpaid bill doesn't switch off the alerts.
The standard model routes an emergency to a generic call center, then to a biological next-of-kin. For older adults outside conventional family structures — and for LGBTQ+ elders, who are roughly twice as likely to live alone and far less likely to have adult children — that chain fails at the first link. WanderCare escalates to a chosen support network first, in a tiered order the elder sets, so the person who actually shows up is the one who gets the call.
Radar sees a fall or a no-motion event without seeing a face or a body. That's the default in every room. Cameras are opt-in, per room, and never in bedrooms or bathrooms. The elder holds a five-level privacy dial and a physical off-switch that no one — not a family member, not us, not a remote server — can override. Data is edge-processed and stays on the home hub. It is never sold and never used to train models.
WanderCare is built on Person-Centered, Trauma-Informed (PCTI) care — the framework developed under federal ACL funding for serving older trauma survivors, and authored by WanderCare's founder, Michael Eisinger, in JFNA's care-training models. That means consent, control, and dignity are design constraints, not afterthoughts: nothing is forced, surveillance is refused, and the person being cared for stays in charge of it.
A 2025 randomized trial found that passive monitoring alone produced no change in hospitalizations or care visits at one year. We take that seriously rather than ignore it. WanderCare's thesis is that monitoring only matters if it reliably reaches a real human in the person's chosen network — the human layer the passive-only systems lacked. We will never claim WanderCare improves clinical outcomes. It is a wellness and safety platform, not a medical device, and it does not detect all falls.