A 1981 study of falls at home in six English general practices is quoted constantly; a 2008 cohort of people over 90 is quoted almost as often. Both are real and useful. Neither says what a sales page usually says it says.
Key facts
- The largest Canadian randomised trial of passive remote monitoring in home care — 313 client-caregiver dyads across Ontario and Nova Scotia — found no statistically significant reduction in admission to a higher level of care at one year (Ontario HR 0.7, P=.30; Nova Scotia HR 1.1, P=.90). The authors write that the study "did not yield statistically significant results regarding the effectiveness of the PRM model" (Donelle et al., JMIR Aging, 2025).
- Every citation on this site carries the year, the country and how many people were studied, because a 1981 English study of 125 people is routinely quoted as though it were current Canadian evidence.
- Where a study is old, small, or was funded by someone with an interest, that is said in the sentence that cites it and not in a footnote.
Where the numbers on this site come from
Every sourced figure sits on the page that uses it. Canada carries the Canadian falls statistics with the government source they came from, and the directory records every product attribute with the vendor URL and the date we read it.
The category pages carry the evidence for each product type:
- Remote-monitoring services and home-care bundles — the Canadian randomised trial, reported with its null result first
- Radar fall-detection sensors — what separates a laboratory result from a product claim
- Medication dispensers — what the adherence evidence does and does not show
- Acoustic monitoring — a vendor-produced report read against its own method section
- Daily check-in apps and GPS locators — two categories where the published evidence is thin, and the pages say so
If you think we have read a study wrongly, tell us and cite the paragraph: info@walledcare.com.
The papers behind the claims
Each link goes to the paper itself.
- The long lie, 1981 — Wild, Nayak & Isaacs, How dangerous are falls in old people at home?, BMJ 1981. 125 people aged 65 and over who fell at home in six English general practices; 20 of them lay on the floor for more than an hour. Small, old, English, and the origin of most long-lie statistics in circulation (BMJ, via PMC, 1981).
- Getting up after a fall, over-90s — Fleming & Brayne, Inability to get up after falling, subsequent time on floor, and summoning help, BMJ 2008. A prospective cohort of 110 people aged 91 to 105 in Cambridge; 80% of falls that happened when the person was alone and had a call alarm passed without the alarm being used (BMJ, via PMC, 2008).
- The Canadian passive-monitoring trial — Donelle et al., JMIR Aging 2025: the null result above, in full, including that the sensor kits studied were mixed and included cameras (JMIR Aging, 2025).
- Why a funded Canadian service went unused — a JMIR Aging stakeholder study of New Brunswick's passive remote monitoring program, funded since 2008 and used by fewer than 100 clients over 12 years (JMIR Aging, via PMC, 2022).
- Scoping review of passive remote monitoring — the Canadian review that concluded "more high-quality research on this topic is needed" (Canadian Journal on Aging, 2023).
- Acoustic monitoring and night checks — the Care England / Adaptive Care report Modernising Night-Time Care, read against its own method section rather than its press release. It is a vendor-produced report, not a peer-reviewed study (Care England, 2026).
What we cannot do
We cannot tell you what to buy from a paper. A study reports what happened to the people in it; that is not a recommendation, and a result in one trial is not evidence that a particular product will do anything in a particular home. We do not run the studies and we do not test the products.
Where WalledCare fits
We make one of the products this evidence is about, which is exactly why the trial that found nothing is the first paper listed above. A vendor-run site that cited only the flattering studies would not be worth reading. WalledCare reports presence, movement, prolonged stillness and prolonged inactivity, room by room; it does not detect falls, does not measure breathing, and is not a medical device, and no study on this page shows that it or anything like it changes an outcome.