Ageing populations require innovative solutions that redesign familiar tools of everyday life to support their often more complex lives.
For most of human history, longevity was a simple aspiration: more time. We measured progress in birthdays reached, diseases survived and years added to life. By that measure, Canada has arrived at a remarkable moment. In 2026, one in five Canadians is aged 65 or older, making Canada a super-aged nation.
But every achievement eventually asks something more of us. The question is no longer simply whether we can extend life. It is whether the systems surrounding that life are keeping pace.
The National Institute on Ageing’s Ageing in Canada Survey, supported by Manulife, found that 43% of older Canadians are at high risk of social isolation and only 29% feel they can afford to retire when they want. Positive feelings about ageing have also fallen, from 62% in 2024 to 57% in 2025.
These are often treated as separate problems: health belongs to one system, financial security to another, social connection somewhere else entirely.
Yet people do not experience their lives in those categories. A health shock can soon become a financial one, and financial insecurity can narrow choice, connection and purpose – highlighting how the architecture of longevity is interconnected, even when the institutions designed to support it are not.
Initiative to tackle Canada’s longevity challenges
That is the premise behind the Manulife Longevity Institute and a new chapter in its work. In April 2026, Manulife launched the Shaping Canada’s Longevity Advantage challenge with the World Economic Forum’s early-stage innovation initiative UpLink and its Centre for Financial and Monetary Systems.
The call was deliberately broad: find practical, integrated solutions that strengthen health, financial resilience, purpose and connection across longer, more complex lives. The initiative's value is not only its ability to identify ideas, but to connect innovators with expertise across health, finance, technology, policy and investment, the disciplines required to move promising solutions towards wider use.
The wider group of innovators identified through the challenge offers many possible answers. Three examples, Amical, MIMOSA Diagnostics and Myant Health, illustrate one particularly important shift. Their technologies are different, but each brings intelligence, care or connection closer to where ageing populations already are.
These ventures are useful examples because each is redesigning a familiar part of daily life: a phone, a clinical assessment and the clothes we wear. Together, they help make a larger transition in longevity innovation easier to see.
Longevity innovation is moving closer to daily life
Here are three start-ups that are helping to shape Canada’s longevity economy.
Amical: when advanced technology feels familiar
There is a persistent assumption that innovation asks people to learn something new, and Amical challenges that. Its voice-based artificial intelligence (AI) companion is delivered through a familiar telephone, with no screen, app or unfamiliar interface. It offers personalized conversation and cognitive stimulation for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive disorders by keeping them engaged daily, while also helping families and care teams remain connected.
Amical does not require people to reorganize their lives around technology; rather, it reorganizes technology around the realities of care. In doing so, it suggests that inclusion is not a feature added at the end of innovation. Instead, it is a design decision made at the beginning. Wider adoption, however, will depend on trust, privacy safeguards and evidence that the experience creates sustained value for users and caregivers.
MIMOSA Diagnostics: when hidden risk becomes visible
Some of the most consequential health risks begin before the eye can see them. MIMOSA Diagnostics has developed a portable, non-invasive imaging platform that assesses tissue health at the point of care. By revealing changes beneath the skin, it can help clinicians identify risk earlier and support intervention in pressure injuries and wound care – conditions which often affect seniors, particularly. those who are bedridden or have limited mobility – before visible breakdown occurs.
The broader implication is important. Healthcare systems are largely built to respond once a condition becomes apparent, but MIMOSA points towards a more preventative model, one in which sophisticated insight is portable, practical and closer to the patient. Its value will also depend on continued clinical validation, integration into care pathways and access across different settings.
Myant Health: when care becomes part of what we wear
Healthcare still depends heavily on isolated snapshots: a reading taken in a clinic, at a particular moment, under conditions unlike everyday life. Myant Health asks what becomes possible when the things people already wear can create a more continuous picture. Its SKIIN-connected garments, chest bands, tank tops and undergarments, knit sensing capability into clothing enabling ongoing monitoring of signals such as heart rhythm, breathing, temperature and movement meaning heart conditions such as atrial fibrillation can be detected and treated earlier.
Myant Health's solutions highlight how health insight can be integrated rather than imposed. A more continuous view of an older person's health can help people and care teams recognize change earlier, make better-informed decisions and remain connected over time. SKIIN is commercially available and being used in clinical settings in Canada for remote electrocardiogram monitoring, while other applications and capabilities are still in development. Real-world impact will depend on data governance, comfort, affordability and whether continuous monitoring leads to timely, useful action.
The next longevity breakthrough may be a system, not a product
Each solution closes some of the distance between a person and the support they may need – Amical brings connection into a familiar telephone, MIMOSA brings earlier insight to the point of care and Myant brings health monitoring into clothing.
But promising technology does not scale on merit alone; it needs evidence, responsible governance, investment, trusted pathways into care and communities willing to shape how it is used.
It must also prove that it can reach people equitably rather than deepen existing gaps, and no innovator, company or institution can create those conditions independently. The next longevity breakthrough may therefore be less about a single product than about the system built around it.
The Manulife Longevity Institute, launched by Manulife with a $350 million commitment through to 2030 to help close the gap between how long people live and their quality of health, is one platform seeking to help build that system by connecting evidence with enterprise, innovators with partners and insight with implementation.
Its contribution will be measured not by the ideas it convenes, but by whether collaboration helps useful solutions become trusted, accessible and effective in people’s lives – and the Shaping Canada's Longevity Advantage challenge will play a key role in achieving this.
We have already learned how to add years to life. The more ambitious work now is to create the conditions that give those years greater health, agency, connection and confidence. That future is ours to design together.
