Providers must look to Asia for solutions, say futurist, peak

“Often necessity is the mother of invention,” and the Australian aged care sector must embrace the significant technological leaps seen in Asia, Australian Ageing chief executive officer Tom Symondson has told a captivated ITAC 2025 audience in Melbourne this week.

“If you can go to Singapore, or if you can learn from some of the things that are happening through Ageing Asia – and we will help you with that through our partnership… you can learn things not just from the person down the road, or the person in Perth, or in Cairns, but from the person in Ho Chi Minh, or in Helsinki, or in Boston and I’d encourage you to look and spend some time doing that, even if you can’t go, work with us. We can point out those examples to you,” he urged providers on Thursday at ITAC 2025 conference, which attracted over 650 people to Marvel Stadium.

“There is innovation everywhere. Often the biggest barriers are ones we impose on ourselves. And I would like the challenge that I set for you all to be, yes, it’s hard… It is so hard. And yet you still all turn up every day to do it because you care, because you want to make a difference to the lives of your community, don’t you? That’s the whole point. Are you here because you like to work in a sector where everybody puts you down all the time, where everything’s hard, where everything’s difficult? No, you’re here because it makes a difference. But we’ve got to find a way to get through the complexity.

“We’ve got to find a way to make it simpler for ourselves, and we’ve got to find a way to make it simpler and easier for older people themselves, who will always say, ‘we are incredibly complicated to work with, it’s incredibly hard to navigate, and it took me a year to get my package, why?’ we’ve got to use the innovation in this room and far beyond to solve that problem. And if we can do that, we can all retire.”

A key part of his encouragement for the Australian sector to look to Asia was their acceptance of failure, and their commitment to continuously improving on technological advancement despite those initial failures – a mentality lacking here.

“I find a lot of southeast Asian countries are much less afraid of the things we’re afraid of, much less afraid of the red tape and barriers, much less afraid of potential criticism, and so they just go, ‘well, if this robot could help us, let’s have a go,’ whereas here, it would take six months, there would be a board sub-committee, you might write to the ministry, you might ask the department, engage with all these people, and then they go, ‘no, we’re not going to do it,’ so you don’t do it,” he said.

“That’s not how it works, in my experience, in places like Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam. Often necessity is the mother of invention. They often don’t have systems that are anywhere near as well-funded or as evolved as the one that we are lucky to have, and that has made them more innovative.”

Mr Symondson recognised that innovation has become more of a buzzword than a source of inspiration for the sector, with so many barriers put up preventing people from remaining engaged, but he encouraged providers to be embrace the uncertainty of transformation and value the innovative ideas of their workforce.

“Innovation has become something that we think is expensive. It’s become something that we think will get us in trouble if it doesn’t go right, because remember, lots of innovations fail. But most of the learnings are in the failure,” he said.

“Because we as organisations are often extremely risk averse, we see failure as bad in all circumstances, even though an innovation without failure is probably not going to happen at all. It’s certainly not going to be the platform for the next great idea, because everybody’s got burnt and walked away. That’s not what we want innovation to be. We want innovation to be at our core and in our DNA. We want people to be able to think innovatively, be agile, deliver great change, and not be punished for it. We want our members to be able to be innovative and not be punished for it.

“But most importantly, because we’re all about the people we’re here to serve, the older people who are using your services now and those that will in the future, we want to see those innovations scale.”

Asia’s technology solutions

The encouragement to really embrace the possibility of failure in the hopes of improving technology for the sector and to look beyond Australia was shared by scientific futurist, tech influencer, author and robotics expert Associate Professor Dr Catherine Ball who reminded the ITAC 2025 audience that the technology they want already exists in Asia, and could be introduced here if stronger relationships are fostered.

She pointed to the Toyota Woven City in Japan as an example – an apartment complex built by Toyota as part of their vision as a mobility company.

The Woven City is a fully automated smart city dedicated to creating mobility solutions that has put Japan at the forefront of smart apartments for older people wanting stay at home care.

“The smart apartments that the Japanese have are number one,” Dr Ball said.

“One of the reasons being, they are not allowed to have cameras. So they produce the Pepper robots and things like that that have lots of cameras on them. You’re not allowed to have cameras inside aged care facilities and their CCTV rules are very different in Japan. So their apartments are completely smart in ways that our apartments aren’t, because we use cameras for a lot of things, and so Woven City, for me, is an absolute pinnacle of research and investment.”

Dr Ball also encouraged providers to look to South Korea, which has started introducing exoskeletons in health and aged care.

“In Australia and across the Pacific, we tend to use them in our defence forces, so that people don’t twist their knees or roll their ankles when they’re in the theatres of war and running around rocky outcrops and things. But if you imagine now, you here might have had somebody in the last 10 years go off on a workers’ compensation for a slip, twist, trip, or a fall, and how much that costs you, and how much that causes pain, and how nurses and workers are having to lift heavy patients or handle heavy patients, where an exoskeleton will cost you about five grand and that exoskeleton could allow you to lift 120 kilos,” she said.

“Can you see now where you’re going to get bitten by the Workplace Health and Safety Act when these technologies start coming into Australia and scaling if you’re not on the front end? Because the Workplace Health and Safety Act says if there’s a known and available technology and you didn’t use it, you are liable.”

“As they come into the healthcare industry, you don’t want to be on the back foot of this. You need to be all over this,” Dr Ball said.

She reminded providers that South Korean and Japanese innovation is on Australia’s doorstep and a reliance on American innovators saving technology for us will see Australia left behind.

“We need to look at communities around the Asia-Pacific who are dealing with what we are going to be dealing with,” she said.

“These people are already in the future in terms of the demographics of what we’re going to have in Australia. We should be watching and learning and listening very carefully, regardless of the language barrier.

“Just because Americans speak English does not mean that culturally we are more aligned to them. Believe me, they’re not. They don’t care about us. We seem to think that they do, but they really don’t.”

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