Some of these words are technical, some are legal, and some are marketing terms that sound technical. Knowing which is which is most of the value, so each entry below says which kind of word it is, and gives a source where one exists.
Key facts
- Where a term has an official Canadian definition, this page quotes it and links to it. Where it does not, the entry says so instead of inventing an authority for it.
- Several of these words mean one thing in a clinical assessment and something looser in a product page. ADL and fall detection are the two that cause the most confusion, and both are flagged below.
- A term being defined here is not an endorsement that the thing works. Whether it works is a separate question, and the studies are in the research hub.
The words for what a sensor does
Presence
Whether a person is in a defined space right now, including a person who is sitting still. Presence is the harder of the two ideas below, because a sensor that only reacts to movement will decide an unmoving person is not there.
Occupancy
Whether a space is in use. In practice most products sold as "occupancy sensors" are motion sensors with a timer: they declare a room occupied when they see movement, and unoccupied a set number of minutes after the last movement. That is why a lighting occupancy sensor switches the light off on somebody reading quietly, and why "occupancy" and "presence" are not interchangeable words even though catalogues use them as if they were.
Motion
A change of position that a sensor can detect. Motion is what almost every cheap sensor actually measures; presence, stillness and routine are all inferred from patterns of motion over time, not sensed directly.
PIR (passive infrared)
The white plastic dome in most alarm systems and light switches. It detects change in infrared heat across its field of view — so it reacts to a warm body crossing in front of it, and stops reporting when that body stops moving. It is called "passive" because it emits nothing and only receives. Cheap, low-power, blind through walls and closed doors, and unable to distinguish one person from two, or a person from a large dog.
mmWave (millimetre-wave radar)
Radar operating at millimetre wavelengths — the high end of the radio spectrum. Health Canada's Safety Code 6 sets exposure limits across "the frequency range from 3 kHz to 300 GHz" (Health Canada, Safety Code 6, checked September 2026), and the room sensors sold for eldercare sit at the top of that range. In Canada they are usually licence-exempt equipment under Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada's RSS-210, which has an annex for "devices operating in the band 57-71 GHz" (ISED, RSS-210, checked September 2026). The products are covered in radar presence sensors and radar fall-detection sensors.
Field disturbance sensor
The regulator's name for what a radar room sensor is. ISED's RSS-210 defines it as a device that detects "changes in a radio frequency field as a result of movement of persons or objects" (ISED, RSS-210, checked September 2026). Worth holding on to, because it is a plain description of the whole of what the radio part of these products does: it notices that something moved.
FMCW and Doppler
Two ways of getting information out of a returned radio signal. Doppler reads the frequency shift caused by something moving toward or away from the sensor, so it is good at movement and poor at a stationary object. FMCW — frequency- modulated continuous wave — sweeps the transmitted frequency across a band and compares the returned sweep with the outgoing one, which yields range as well. Most eldercare room radar is FMCW, which is why a product sheet can talk about distance and zones rather than only "movement, yes or no".
Wi-Fi sensing
Inferring that a body has moved from how it disturbs the radio signal already travelling between a router and the devices on the network. No new sensor is installed. See Wi-Fi sensing for what that buys and what it costs in reliability.
Acoustic monitoring
A microphone in a room, with software that classifies sounds and raises an alert. The category page is acoustic monitoring; the recurring question is not what it hears but what it records, and who can listen.
Prolonged stillness
A person is present in a room and has not moved for longer than a set period. It is an observation about movement over time, not a judgement about the person. A sensor reporting prolonged stillness is reporting exactly that and nothing more — it does not know whether someone is asleep, reading, or on the floor.
Prolonged inactivity
No movement detected anywhere in a covered space over a set period — the "nothing has happened in this flat since yesterday evening" signal, as opposed to "someone is in this room and has been still for forty minutes". The two get confused constantly, including by vendors.
Edge vs cloud processing
Where the interpretation happens. Edge processing means the raw signal is turned into a conclusion on the device in the room and only the conclusion leaves. Cloud processing means raw or near-raw data is sent elsewhere and interpreted there. This is the question underneath most privacy conversations about monitoring, and it is separate from where the resulting data is stored — see data residency.
False positive, false negative, nuisance alert
A false positive is an alert for something that did not happen; a false negative is a real event the system did not report. A nuisance alert is a technically correct alert that nobody needed — the cat, the cleaner, the radiator. Systems are usually abandoned over nuisance alerts rather than over false negatives, because the false negatives are invisible.
The words for what a product is
PERS (personal emergency response system)
A wearable button, usually with a base station, that summons help when pressed. The Canada Revenue Agency uses the phrase directly, listing "personal response systems such as Lifeline and Health Line Services" among the common medical expenses you cannot claim (CRA Guide RC4065, Medical Expenses, 2025 tax year). The products are in medical alert pendants and watches.
Monitored vs unmonitored
Monitored means a paid response centre answers when the alert is raised and decides what to do. Unmonitored means the alert goes to a family member's phone. Monitored costs a monthly fee and does not depend on a relative being awake; unmonitored is cheaper and depends entirely on who is available. It is the single biggest driver of the five-year cost worked out on the compare table.
Fall detection
A product feature: the system claims to notice a fall without anyone pressing anything, usually from an accelerometer in a wearable or from radar in a room. It is a real, sayable feature and several vendors claim it. This site quotes each claim in the vendor's own words and records whether the vendor publishes real-world accuracy data; we do not test the products and we do not endorse or dispute the claims.
Long lie
The term for staying on the floor for a long period after a fall because you cannot get up and cannot summon help. There is no single agreed threshold, but the two papers most often cited both used one hour. Wild, Nayak and Isaacs studied 125 people aged 65 and over who fell at home in six English general practices, and reported that twenty "lay on the floor for more than one hour" (BMJ, via PMC, 1981). Fleming and Brayne followed 110 people aged 91 to 105 in Cambridge for a year and found that "30% (20/66) had lain on the floor for an hour or more", and that in 80% of falls where the person was alone and had a call alarm, the alarm was not used (BMJ, via PMC, 2008). Both are small, both are British, and neither shows that any product changes what happens. They are the origin of most of the long-lie numbers in circulation.
ADL (activity of daily living)
The everyday self-care tasks a care assessment asks about — washing, dressing, eating, using the toilet, getting from a bed to a chair, walking. Instrumental ADLs, or IADLs, are the next layer out: cooking, shopping, managing money, taking medication, using the telephone. A clinical assessment scores these against a named instrument. A product page that says it "monitors ADLs" is usually not using an instrument at all, and we could not find one official Canadian definition to point at, so treat the phrase in marketing as a claim to be asked about rather than a measurement.
Aging in place
The Government of Canada's seniors' checklist defines it as "having access to services and the health and social supports you need to live safely and independently in your home or your community for as long as you wish or are able" (Employment and Social Development Canada, checked September 2026). Note what is in that sentence and what is not: it is about services and supports, not about devices.
Passive remote monitoring (PRM)
Sensors in a home that report on activity without the person doing anything — no button, usually nothing worn. It is the term used in the Canadian research, including the randomised trial of 313 client-caregiver dyads in Ontario and Nova Scotia that found no statistically significant reduction in admission to a higher level of care at one year (Donelle et al., JMIR Aging, 2025), and the Canadian scoping review whose abstract concludes that "more high-quality research on this topic is needed" (Read et al., Canadian Journal on Aging, 2023).
The words for law, hosting and regulation
PIPEDA
The federal private-sector privacy law. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner describes it as setting "the ground rules for how private-sector organizations collect, use, and disclose personal information in the course of for-profit, commercial activities across Canada" (OPC, PIPEDA in brief, checked September 2026).
PHIPA
Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act, the provincial statute that governs personal health information in Ontario. It is one of four provincial health privacy laws the federal government has declared substantially similar to PIPEDA, alongside New Brunswick's Personal Health Information Privacy and Access Act and the Personal Health Information Act in each of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador (OPC, provincial laws deemed substantially similar, checked September 2026). PHIPA's own text is on Ontario's e-Laws, which we could not read with an automated fetch, so this entry does not quote the statute.
Health information custodian
The category of organisation that PHIPA places its obligations on. Whether a particular operator or vendor is one is a legal question with real consequences, and one for a lawyer or a privacy officer rather than a glossary. The phrase is here so that you recognise it in an RFP, a contract or a care-home policy.
Substantially similar
The federal designation that lets provincial legislation apply in place of PIPEDA for organisations within that province. It is a formal status, not a compliment, and the list is published by the OPC at the link in the PHIPA entry above.
Data residency
Where data physically sits. It is a procurement requirement far more often than it is a legal one: the OPC states plainly that "PIPEDA does not prohibit organizations in Canada from transferring personal information to an organization in another jurisdiction for processing", while "an organization is responsible for personal information in its possession or custody, including information that has been transferred to a third party for processing" (OPC, guidelines for processing personal data across borders, checked September 2026). So "hosted in Canada" is an answer a buyer may reasonably require; it is not, by itself, what the federal law demands.
Data sovereignty
The broader argument that data about people in a country should be subject only to that country's laws and courts. It is a policy position rather than a defined legal term, and it is not interchangeable with data residency, although RFPs use the two words as though it were.
Medical device
Health Canada defines it as "any instrument or component used to treat, diagnose or prevent a disease or abnormal physical condition", and groups devices into four classes "based on the expected level of risk to a person's health and safety" (Health Canada, about medical devices, checked September 2026). The part that catches vendors out is that this is decided by what you say the product is for: Health Canada's classification guidance states that "it is the intended use of the device that primarily determines the class of the device" and that classification "must be consistent with the claims that appear on the label of the device" (Health Canada, risk-based classification guidance, checked September 2026). A marketing sentence is a claim on the label. That is why the wording of a product page matters as much as the hardware inside it.
Safety Code 6
Health Canada's limits on human exposure to radiofrequency energy, whose stated purpose is "to establish safety limits for human exposure to radiofrequency (RF) fields in the frequency range from 3 kHz to 300 GHz" (Health Canada, Safety Code 6, checked September 2026). Any radio device legally sold in Canada, including a room radar sensor, is required to comply with the exposure requirements built on it. The numbers themselves are on is mmWave radar safe?.
What we could not define here
Two words you will meet in product marketing have no entry above, because we could not find a definition to stand behind. "Wellness score" and "independence score" have no published definition we were able to locate and no consistent meaning between the vendors that use them. If you are shown either one, the useful question is not what it means in general but what specific measurement that particular product performed to produce it.
Where WalledCare fits
The two terms this glossary defines most carefully — prolonged stillness and prolonged inactivity — are the two things our own product reports, alongside presence and movement, room by room. They are deliberately narrow: they describe movement over time in a room, and they say nothing about a person's body or health. WalledCare does not detect falls, does not measure breathing, and is not a medical device, and the entry on medical device above explains why the wording of that sentence matters as much as the hardware does.