06 September,2026 08:00 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
Olando and Volzia Fernandes joined Khyaal, an app for senior citizens, in 2022, and have since inspired as many as 15 of their neighbours and friends to be a part of the community. PIC/SATEJ SHINDE
Mumbai residents Olando, 72, and Volzia Fernandes, 69, joined Khyaal in 2022 after Olando chanced upon an advertisement put out by the app, now India's largest age-tech platform catering to over five million senior citizens in the country.
Locked indoors in the pandemic, the app's virtual community club presented the couple with something to look forward to, especially, as they recall, "Tambola in the afternoons". They also joined hobby-based programmes like yoga classes, crochet workshops, a weekly interactive community cooking and storytelling session called Food Stories, along with guidance sessions on booking cabs and preventing bank fraud, each using the platform for approximately two hours a day.
"Every morning we log on to Khyaal to see what events are on for the day," says Volzia, who has also used the app to shop for varicose veins stockings with a special prepaid Khyaal card given to members for safe online transactions. In November 2025, the couple participated in 50Above50, a two-day senior talent hunt across 50 categories including singing, dancing, cooking and photography, hosted by the platform at NESCO where they met other members of the "Khyaal family" and made new friends. "I also got about 15 of my friends and neighbours to join them," Olando, who hopes to go on one of Khyaal's senior-focused tours, tells us.
For Hemanshu Jain, founder and CEO of Khyaal, prior experience with Diabeto, a medical technology company centred on diabetes therapeutics, revealed how much seniors struggled with devices, a problem that intensified during the pandemic when those who were resistant to change had no option but to transition to paying bills and ordering daily essentials online. "That was the time seniors needed the most amount of support, and we thought that the best way to solve problems for the elderly is through tech and to solve it via the most powerful device they already have: a smartphone," Jain shares.
Hemanshu Jain
Started in 2020 as a WhatsApp group in Mumbai to help isolated seniors, Khyaal is one among several age-tech companies in India today spanning healthcare, emergency support, financial care, family caregiving, remote management, and social and community engagement, offering services ranging from digital payments, investments and insurance, to everyday assistance with travel, learning, fitness, and entertainment.
"Now is the best time to build for age tech as a category," insists Jain. Seniors have time on their hands, a matter intensified by the fact that younger generations are moving away for professional opportunities. "If they have spent all their lives working professionally or building wealth, this is their time to pursue passions, to keep themselves physically and mentally active and find new purpose too," says Jain.
Prashanth Reddy
He also points to developments occurring worldwide not only from the mobile perspective, but also with companies building in the sensors space (shifting from wearable gadgets to ambient, invisible home infrastructure), and working with assistive humanoids and robots, all with tremendous potential for the eldercare industry.
Moreover, "longevity is now the new theme, and there's an overlap between longevity and age tech," says Jain, pointing to the larger cultural shift towards extending healthspan and merging biotechnology with lifestyle changes.
With telecom companies penetrating smaller cities and digital adoption among seniors being much higher in India compared to other countries, age tech in India has evolved more than it has in other countries, says Jain. The typical Khyaal user, we learn, is an urban woman in her mid-60s. "This stems from the fact that women outlive men because they are much more social. Sixty-five per cent of our members are women and they are active - both ex-professionals and homemakers," says Jain. They are also the ones, he says, who push their spouses to join the app. "Men hesitate. I see this with my father: he hesitates to come forward in a social setup," shares the founder.
Anvayaa Kin Care is an elder-care platform that provides 360-degree home healthcare, emergency response, and daily assistance services. Users typically come as a pair - an elder between 65 and 80, including women living alone, often widowed; and their adult child who is in their late 30s or 40s, settled in a metro or abroad. "Both are users. Both have needs. You can't serve one well without understanding the other," says Prashanth Reddy, founder and MD of Anvayaa.
Early challenges for the platform which turned 10 this year, included building trust with families and technology adoption, which led to a focus on intuitive wearables and a service-first model driven by on-ground care managers trained by geriatricians.
But the pandemic "nearly broke the model". "We're a business built on physical presence. Suddenly we couldn't get in," he recalls, "We rebuilt everything in about six weeks: teleconsultations, remote monitoring, medicines, grocery, vaccinations at the door, virtual companionship calls. [Some of] those features are now permanent. I wouldn't have built them that fast without that pressure."
He also draws attention to the connection between the emergence of India's age-tech space with the acute pressure on its healthcare systems. "Our healthcare infrastructure was designed for acute illness, not for what ageing actually looks like," where a person doesn't necessarily need a hospital but someone paying attention every day.
The purpose of age-tech, he insists, is not to replace doctors but to "reduce the number of times you need one urgently," an objective it attempts to meet by leveraging AI, IoT wearables and predictive care, in order to monitor vitals, track medical adherence and manage post-operative recovery. The model, he believes, enables early detection of emergencies and reduces preventable hospital readmissions, thereby alleviating pressure on the clinical infrastructure.
A key area of focus for these start-ups has been building tech solutions specifically for dementia. Anvayaa's dementia care app is such a tool designed to manage home-based care for patients. Its features, says Prashanth Reddy, founder and MD of Anvayaa, were built out of conversations with caregivers. "The product couldn't feel like a database for tracking someone's decline."
Thus, the daily routine structuring facet came from families describing how unpredictability caused the most distress for the patient, while the caregiver mood tracking feature came from realising that the caregiver is also a patient in these situations - "the most unacknowledged one in the room".
A finding that drove the platform's personalised approach was how deeply isolation affects health. "Loneliness drives health outcomes more than almost anything else," observes Reddy. "Members who feel socially connected deteriorate more slowly. Their health markers are better. That's not a soft feel-good finding. That is a clinical reality."
Age-tech, despite its attentive advancements, is still wholly limited to India's urban population. Dr Aabha Chaudhary, social gerontologist and founder and chairperson of Anugraha, a national voluntary, non-profit focusing heavily on the rural elderly, points out that the urban elderly is by and large educated and have their basic needs of shelter, medical aid, pensions and financial security met.
Dr Aabha Chaudhary
"One of the main difficulties of this urban well-to-do middle-class or upper-middle-class generation is loneliness," she highlights, which technology, by connecting them with peer groups and providing access to basic preventive health care, i.e., information regarding diet, non-communicable diseases, mental and brain health, can alleviate.
"But technology is yet to reach the rural elderly." She also points to the "huge gap of connectivity between these technological service providers and NGOs, civil society organisations, old age homes, senior citizens' and retired persons' associations and institutions working for the elderly." In a typical senior citizens' association, there can be as many as 4000-5000 members, she says.
"If we get to know about these innovations, we can arrange for an interface with the elderly. But these technological upgradation companies live in a separate universe. They are not connected with the target group. [Their services are] for a very exclusive group of people. It doesn't come to the people on the ground."
India is also looking at a demographic shift; its elderly population is projected to grow significantly in the coming decades. "We are not prepared for this grey tsunami," says Dr Chaudhary, who has worked in geriatric care for 25 years.
"There are not enough systems of care in place. There is no manpower," she says, pointing to the need for a dedicated technologically savvy young generation trained as geriatric caregivers, support providers, and escorts. "The need for dialogue with civil society is very important," she insists. "We have extensive databases of senior citizens. Our teams who have worked in geriatric care for so long need a technological interface, they need application."
230 million
Estimated senior citizen population in India by 2036
' National Commission on Population
