Voices: roeland Pelgrims, Ceo, Nobi

This article is sponsored by Nobi. Fall prevention has become one of the most important areas of innovation in senior living. But for operators, the real question is not just which technology can detect risk. It is which solutions can actually support better care while helping buildings run more effectively. In this Voices interview, Roeland Pelgrims, CEO of Nobi, shares what makes the company’s approach to ambient monitoring different, how operators can think beyond standalone safety tools, and what will separate communities that use technology to improve both resident outcomes and operations in 2026.

Senior Housing News: What perspective or experience has most shaped the way you think about fall prevention, resident safety and the role of technology in senior living today?

Roeland Pelgrims: There are two experiences that really shaped how I think about fall prevention, resident safety and technology in senior living.

The first came a few years ago, right before we started Nobi. I was an investor in and board member of a large senior living organization, and falls were a major issue in our own communities. We wanted to solve that problem with technology, so we went out and looked at the solutions available. Honestly, we were not very happy with what we found.

The biggest reason was simple. Everything was too ugly. And I actually think that matters a lot. Technology in senior living is installed in people’s homes. This is where they live. We have to take that seriously. I strongly believe that ugliness kills and beauty is a moral duty. Design matters. Residents deserve to be treated not only as residents or patients, but as people, customers and consumers. They deserve technology that is not only necessary, but desirable.

That is one of my core beliefs about technology. Good technology has to be more than functional. It has to be something people can actually like living with and working with. That applies to residents, care staff and everyone who touches the solution. I think a lot of health care and senior living technology has not embraced that principle enough.

The second perspective is that good care also has to be good business. A solution can deliver fantastic care outcomes, but it will only be adopted at scale if it also moves the financial, operational and commercial metrics. This is an industry with very warm ambitions, but a cold reality. Resources are limited and margins are thin.

So yes, we need to be great at fall detection. We need to be great at fall prevention. But that is not enough. Technology also has to improve operations, information, insights, efficiency and ROI. In that sense, we have two customers: the resident, who needs to be safe, healthy and happy, and the operator, who needs to be successful and profitable. Great technology has to bridge both.

The fall prevention space is crowded with sensors, wearables and monitoring tools. What makes Nobi fundamentally different, and why does that distinction matter for operators still evaluating solutions?

I think the biggest difference is that from the start, we chose a light fixture as the hardware platform. That gave us a huge advantage, because we could put a lot of technology into a device without the same space and volume constraints you have with many other solutions. That allows us to live by the idea of beauty on the outside, intelligence on the inside.

Because it is a light, Nobi can combine sensor technology, connectivity, sound, vision and lighting in one device. In that sense, it is a little bit like an iPhone. When you install it, it comes with certain functions already built in, including strong fall detection and fall prevention. But it is also a platform where new functionality can be released without changing the hardware, because the technology is already there. It is just another app.

That could include two-way communication, or the light becoming a conversation engine with seniors, asking them in the morning how their night was and sending that information straight into the EHR. It can support awareness of care delivered, how much care was delivered to which resident and whether that matches their care level. It can also create a sound cocoon with pink noise or white noise to improve sleep quality.

So what makes Nobi different is that we were not designed as a point solution. We were designed as a broad platform that delivers value across care environments and helps transform them from blind and dumb to smart and connected. Fall detection is one application on that platform. Fall prevention is one application. We happen to do both very well, but the platform can expand into much more because it is a light and because of the sound, vision and connectivity built into that single device.

Then, when you look at the ecosystem around it, including smart buttons and smart switches that do not need cables or batteries and take about 10 seconds to install, it becomes even broader. You can expand into a nurse call system without adding a whole new infrastructure.

That is really the distinction. Nobi is an infrastructure platform for smart care, not just a fall detection tool. With the current generation of technology, we still have 0% false negatives in the field. We reduce falls by roughly 55% on average, and a recent study by Lancaster University in the U.K. showed that Nobi-monitored rooms saw a 24% decrease in ambulance callouts and hospital days. So the impact is real, but fall prevention is only one part of the value operators can get from the same budget.

Senior living operators are under enormous pressure, from staffing shortages and razor-thin margins to rising acuity. How does Nobi help operators run a better building, not just a safer one?

That is the fundamental question we have to answer with our iPhone model. What other applications can we add that make life easier for caregivers, help them feel more in control and give managers better insight into how to optimize their care operations?

One example is what we call the care badge. It is a badge for caregivers that gives them several practical advantages. They can tap it once to log in to a mobile device with their credentials. They can use it to open doors as an access control device. They can also use it to call for help.

Imagine you are in a resident’s room and you need assistance lifting that resident. You push the button, and because of the light, the system knows which room you are in. Your colleagues receive an alert that assistance is needed in room 312. Those are direct benefits for the caregiver.

For managers, that same location-aware badge creates a different kind of value. It helps them understand which caregivers have been with which residents, how much time they spent and whether that time matches the expected care level. It can also help show whether the community is billing correctly. In one community where we released that program, they found $6,000 in additional revenue one month in simply by matching care levels more accurately to billing.

That is one example of the Nobi ecosystem creating clear advantages for caregivers and equally important advantages for the community as a whole. From a management perspective, communities can only act on what they are aware of. Delivering data is one thing, but data can quickly become noise. What operators really need are actionable insights.

It should not be, “Here is the data for all your residents.” It should be, “These are the five residents who had the most meaningful changes in their metrics over the past week, and it is worth having your clinical team or resident engagement team look at what happened.” That attention needs to go where it matters most, both at the care level and the operational level.

Data is great. Actionable insights are better. Recommended actions are what operators are really looking for.

AI in senior living can feel like a buzzword. When you speak with operators who are skeptical or fatigued by technology promises, what do you tell them, and how does Nobi earn trust rather than simply claim it?

Earning trust is mainly about listening rather than telling.

What we try to invest in is listening to our customers. Those customers are residents, caregivers and managers. It is about listening to the practical, real, daily challenges those people have and then bringing those insights back to our product and technology team.

The art of listening is not only a mindset. It also requires a certain knowledge of the industry. One of the things that really sets us apart is that on the Nobi team, both on the product side and the customer-facing side, we have a lot of people who spent their careers in senior living before becoming technology builders.

Shelley Esden, our CEO in the U.S., is a great example. She was an operator for many years. She has built care communities from scratch, seen and optimized operations, and understands both the benefits of technology and the challenges of implementing it in a world where staff turnover is high. So when she listens to customers, she listens as a knowledgeable partner.

For a lot of technology builders, it can be very difficult to understand what customers are struggling with because it is a reality they do not know firsthand. I think one thing that sets us apart is that our team does know that reality firsthand. Our founders and senior leadership team came from senior living into technology, not the other way around.

People feel that, and I think that earns trust. We have to be relentless in making sure we keep listening to customers and bring those insights back to our roadmap. We do not need to push customers what we are able to build. We need to build what they desperately need. That is much easier to do when you actually understand what senior living is all about.

You’ve built Nobi around passive, ambient monitoring. What does that design philosophy say about where care technology needs to go, and what is still broken in the way the industry approaches resident monitoring?

I think this is the evolution every technology field goes through. A few years ago, we simply did not have the technological capabilities we have today. Massive jumps have been made in computing power and AI quality. What we can build today is so much more advanced than what we could build 10 years ago.

In that older logic, what the industry built was a huge collection of verticals. You have EHR platforms, resident engagement platforms, in-room monitoring platforms and many others. From today’s perspective, I think it is normal that operators are asking for something different. They do not want just a collection of verticals. They want a single digital backbone for their operations.

Where I think we still need to grow as an industry is in the integration of those vertical capabilities. All of us generate a lot of insights about residents and communities. Combined, those insights are much more powerful than they are in separate silos. But today, a lot of integrations are still pretty cosmetic. They are superficial, and they do not go as deep as they could.

In many cases, when technologies integrate today, one plus one still equals two. Not three, not four, just two. The real collaboration between technologies is still in its very early days.

We are already working on that. For example, from time to time, we team up with Cubigo, a resident engagement company. Imagine Nobi sees that a resident who normally has two bed exits per night is now having four. Bathroom visits have gone up. The resident is spending more time alone in the room. Then Cubigo sees through visitor management that the number of visitors has gone down, through the activity planner that participation in activities has gone down and through the point-of-sale solution that alcohol consumption has gone up.

When you put all of those insights together, you get a well-being score for that resident that is actually meaningful. You can present that to the clinical team and say, the root cause is something you still have to find, but this is clearly a resident worth focusing on.

That is a real example. In that case, when the clinical team looked into it, all of those data points correlated with a change in medication. That medication change was causing symptoms of alienation and depression. The drop in visitors was a consequence of the resident not feeling well and not accepting visits anymore. Once the medication was changed, those metrics started improving again.

I think that is the future of technology in senior living. Operators should expect technology partners to collaborate and truly integrate so that one plus one genuinely becomes three. It needs to be an open world where combined data produces insights that actually help operators optimize care.

We are still in the early days. You hear a lot about integrations and interoperability on stage, but when you zoom in and ask whether we are really delivering that promise to operators, I think the answer today is, only a little. There is still so much to be gained by being more collaborative in this field.

What is one thing you wish more senior living operators understood about the intersection of fall detection, care data and operational decision-making, and where do you see Nobi in five years relative to that vision?

A lot of the same data points that are tied directly to fall detection and fall prevention are also strong indicators of other things that matter.

If we can bring the number of falls down, and we have proven we can do that, then we can also bring down ambulance callouts and hospital days. But we also take away some of the unpredictability in care needs. When a fall happens, it disrupts an entire schedule for caregivers and for the organization. Preventing that disruption has value far beyond the fall itself.

The same is true when residents are more active and sleeping better. If they are more active, they fall less. If they are more active and their sleep quality improves through circadian lighting or a sound cocoon with white noise and pink noise, they can be more lucid. Their brain health can improve. So the insights and capabilities we primarily use around falls can have impact in many more domains.

When I look at reports about the impact of technology today, I genuinely feel we are still only scratching the surface. We are measuring the direct consequence of what a certain technology is focused on, but the indirect consequences over the mid and long term are still something we have to figure out.

Four or five years from now, we are going to be analyzing six to seven years of data from care communities that were technology enabled. Then it will not just be about how many falls happened in month one and how much we brought that number down by month three. We will be able to look more genuinely at population health and well-being. How much happier are people in these communities? How safe do they feel? How much more active are they?

If we do our job well as technology providers, listen enough to our customers and keep fine-tuning our value proposition based on what we learn, that should be the end result. Nobi has already moved from being a fall detection specialist to being an enabler of smart care. If I fast forward five years, I want us to truly be an enabler of resident happiness and resident well-being, while also supporting community health and efficiency.

That journey is going to be exciting because technology is maturing so quickly. What we can deliver today is fundamentally different from what we could deliver three years ago, and what we will be able to deliver five years from now will be incredibly rich. You will have lighting that provides safety, supports well-being and stimulates natural biorhythm. You will have sound that improves sleep patterns and can also be used to share community messages or support natural conversations with technology.

I think loneliness is going to look very different if technology and people start collaborating better. Planning and staffing can become much more efficient because of the data points available. And for residents and staff, interacting with technology is going to become so much easier than it is today.

The biggest challenge with technology implementation has always been training, especially in a world where staff retention is a problem. That is partly because access to the digital world has always depended on a digital interface. That is hard. It is complex. You need to understand computers, understand how the tabs work and acquire that skill.

I think three to five years from now, because of the AI revolution, interaction with those systems will not depend on skill anymore. It will depend on intention. You will be able to hire people with great intentions, not necessarily great technical skills, because the technology skill requirement will have almost disappeared.

How beautiful is it if you can hire for good intentions, not just for digital skills? I do not need to know whether someone is completely familiar with an EHR platform. The interaction between that person and the platform will be natural, organic and enabled by AI. They just need to have great intentions to take care of people.

The technology barrier will be replaced by more natural access to the digital world. That opens the caregiver role to so many more people. Not just people who know how to use complex digital systems and want to take care of others, but people who simply want to take care of others. Five years from now, I think senior living is going to be much more fun because people will be less frustrated by the complexity of their jobs and more focused on what they want to do most, which is taking care of people.

Looking ahead, what will separate senior living operators that use monitoring technology to drive both better care and stronger operations in 2026 from those that continue to treat it as a standalone safety tool?

I think the operators that have a deep understanding of technology as a backbone for their communities, and a real ambition for what that backbone can do, will see a few very clear differences compared with competitors that do not.

First, staff retention will be higher because people will work in more comfortable, predictable and pleasant environments. That happens when technology is fully integrated into workflows in a mature way. Staff retention has a huge impact. It means knowledge retention, culture retention and personal stories that stay inside those communities. A lot of love and engagement walks away when you lose a caregiver. So I think a smoothly integrated technology backbone will become a key instrument of staff retention. Those will be the places where people want to work.

Second, you will see demonstrable differences in resident well-being, resident health, longevity and length of stay. The metrics of those communities will look very different from those that are still a few steps behind. If we can already say today that Nobi reduces ambulance callouts by 24% and reduces falls by more than 50%, how does that compare to a community that does not have those outcomes? Those residents will have a higher need for care, less independence and higher risk. That is not the kind of community where people want to be.

And then last, their financials will be better as well. The same insights that help drive resident happiness and staff happiness are also the insights management can use to drive commercial and efficiency outcomes. People will want to stay there, and they may be willing to pay more.

For example, if I have full awareness of what is happening across my entire community, then staff can focus on the residents who actually need care and make sure care is available when it is needed, but only when it is needed. That creates more efficient communities. Costs go down, efficiency goes up, quality goes up and average length of stay goes up.

So in the end, I think the difference will be very clear. Those operators will have happier residents, happier staff and better financial performance.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nobi is an AI-powered smart lighting and fall detection platform designed for senior living communities. By combining discreet ceiling-mounted lights with intelligent fall detection, Nobi helps care teams respond faster, reduce risk, and protect resident dignity — without wearables or cameras. Trusted by senior living operators across North America and Europe, Nobi supports safer communities and stronger outcomes for residents, staff, and families alike.

Learn more at nobi.life or contact us at info@nobi.life.

The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact sales@arrowfly.com. 

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