Giving care home residents their voices back
For many older people, moving into a care home or assisted living could shrink their world. As families visit less often than they intend, meals are decided for them and staff are busy, loneliness can be common; genuine autonomy is reduced.
It is this problem that Dr Ellie Hickman, an academic at De Montfort University working in retirement living and ageing, has set out to address. Her research centres on a resident‑led communications platform designed to help older people live more independently, stay connected and have a greater say in their daily lives.
The idea is to create a single, intuitive interface – currently delivered via a tablet – through which residents can book onto activities, choose their meals, send messages and interact with staff, other residents or family members. Over time, it could integrate with room sensors and other devices, providing a clearer picture of wellbeing without overwhelming residents with technology. “There are many unconnected gadgets that can deliver this, but nothing is bringing them together in a controlled and trusted way,” Dr Hickman says.
The project is deeply rooted in Dr Hickman’s personal experience of watching her father‑in‑law die in a care home – a place staffed by kind people, but one that left her uncomfortable with the lack of agency afforded to residents. That experience crystallised into a research agenda: designing technologies that genuinely enhance older people’s autonomy, rather than simply monitoring them.
“This is coming from significant societal need,” says Dr Hickman. “I want to help older people live more happily for longer.” It was the Medici programme at the University of Birmingham, however, that helped her turn an interesting research area into a system with a real-world application. “It was a turning point for me,” says Dr Hickman. “I realised that I have an opportunity here to spin a technology solution out of this.”
Medici has been eye-opening. It’s helped me think practically about how I can commercialise my research, from the legal aspects of setting up a business to funding, investment and pitching. The standard of the speakers involved has been outstanding, but I’ve also gained enormously from connecting with colleagues across other Midlands universities, sharing different skills and experiences and supporting each other on that commercialisation journey.
Medici introduced her to different pathways to bringing ideas into practice, the fundamentals of Intellectual Property, and the discipline of articulating a clear value proposition – who benefits, who pays, and why this solution is different.
Equally important was the peer environment. Dr Hickman was in the first Medici cohort to take participants from 16 universities across the Midlands. She found herself among a diverse group of academics, many of them working on medical or deep‑tech innovations. In discussion with them she became more confident in framing her own work as a serious innovation project, and in helping others think through questions like who their real 'customer' might be, and what societal impact actually looks like in practice.
Medici was intensive – eight days of high‑level content – and Dr Hickman says more follow‑up support and mentoring would be valuable, particularly for academics at universities that don’t have the benefit of a large enterprise team like the University of Birmingham’s. But the programme has helped Dr Hickman set what she calls her “north star”: supporting academics to move from research for its own sake towards research that changes systems and lives.
Her communications platform is now at prototype stage, with pilots planned alongside charities and retirement living providers. Working with an AI and cyber‑security professor, she is exploring how trusted, UK‑based AI tools might eventually be layered in to help residents navigate information and services, without compromising privacy.
In an era when universities are under pressure to demonstrate impact, Dr Hickman’s work offers a quietly powerful example of how academic research can be turned into a concrete response to one of society’s most human challenges: ensuring that older people are not just cared for, but heard and involved in positive communities.