Age Tech Market in Finland

Vozrastech is the name of my AgeTech project (“vozrast” means age in Russian and “tech” means, well, tech). So as Russian AgeTech is not well-developed the project’s aim is to improve the situation including bringing best practice. As I’ve worked with senior housing and care segment I see the demand for that is both in B2B and B2C segment, and know that there’s lack of information about solutions available. 

So there should be some research and, you know, TheGerontechnologist.com is a good source of information. There is a lot of data from all around the world on tech for elders (if you like to spend enormous amount of time with a large number of databases). For St. Petersburg, where I was born and raised, the neighboring market of Finland is always good to visit for something interesting. We have a lot of Finnish companies working here already. Moreover, Finland is one of the world leaders in health tech, and that’s important if you are talking about elders.

Long story short, we’ve entered the Finnish market, made a lot of connections, found cool startups and nice people working in them, and organized the first AgeTech conference in Russia with participation from Finland. In that exciting process we discovered that there’s no good source of information about the market. It became obvious that our data could be useful not just for us, but for the market – startups, investors, care provides, media etc. So we’ve made the map.

Most of the market is B2B solutions for elder care providers. Customer records systems, continuous customer & employee feedback, workforce scheduling, nurse call systems, automatic medicine dispensing systems, fall alerts, motion and step sensors – these are the widely used AgeTech solutions. For every purpose, there’s a solution made in Finland. Based on really good R&D, Finns are implementing innovative patents, AI, cloud-based solutions, and creating competitive products. 

However, the market is very small – Finland’s population is only 5.5M with 1.2M (22%) elders, So Finnish AgeTech goes internationally. UK is one of top destinations, but definitely not US. Key market is EU, mostly Nordics and Germany. For B2B any language and culture differences are not so principal. Moreover, there’s kind of government support for health/AgeTech export with a lot of efforts on Asia and Middle East (not Russia =( ).

And that’s why (language and culture and small market) B2C AgeTech in Finland is more local. Some startups have big ambitions, for example in wearables or smartphones for elders, but experts I talked with were very skeptical about the future of this AgeTech segment. People are used to mention success of not even Nokia, but Finnish company Beddit with its sleeping monitor as the company was acquired by Apple, but it’s the only case. With Apple and Asian electronic companies making their smartwatches and phones enriched with health functions (ECG, sleep tracking, alerts etc.) it’s hard to compete globally and even at Finnish market.

The market volume is to be evaluated, but it’s about 9 figures in EUR, not billions. What should give the boost is more reforms in social and healthcare with forced digitalization. With a growing aging population (as in other countries), the need to cut costs and deal with shortage of caregivers. Reforms will give startups assurance that there will be demand and public financing for solutions improving quality of life of elders. The plans are about state/municipal care system more than private demand with out-of-pocket money.

The trend in Finland is definitely about aging in place. There’s statistics about growing share of elder people living in home. So the whole ecosystem with private and public health and care providers is about supporting of independence of elders, where tech is the keystone. 

If we will look more on the personal level, Finnish startups said that elders are very excited and eager to use new technologies. It could be VR-based rehabilitation or medical dispensing robot or virtual group yoga for elders or even Internet service for creating circles of people to care about elder one – AgeTech market of Finland is full of useful solutions.