With nearly one in four Europeans already aged 60 or over, and all countries staggering under growing healthcare costs, there should be plenty of research and development in the area of assistive technologies - technologies to enable elderly people to remain in their own homes for as long as possible.
But in this case, money and will have failed to follow reason and sense, according to computer chip manufacturer Intel, which has its European centre for health research based in its facilities in Leixlip, Co Kildare.
Not even when governments worldwide are well aware their populations are ageing, and that this is a problem that will only scale up, not down - within a few decades, it will be 30 per cent of Europe's population in the over-60 age group, with the US close behind.
Within 50 years, the elderly population will quadruple in size and more than two billion of the world's population will be over 60, with the bulk of healthcare costs focused in that group.
For example, some four million ageing Americans with Alzheimer's cost more to care for right now than the estimated 20 million Americans who currently have diabetes, said Intel's Eric Dishman.
Dishman, general manager and global director of Intel's Health Research and Innovation Group, was in Ireland recently to visit the company's Dublin-based research centre, TRIL (Technology Research for Independent Living).
Intel opened the research centre at Leixlip in January of this year, and it now boasts about 60 staff, divided between researchers, ethnographers, designers and engineers.
Dishman said there's a real and serious need for independent living technologies.
Many elderly people choose to stay out of the healthcare system because they are cared for by their relatives.
As primary carers, families in the US provide €270 billion worth of "free" healthcare generally, he said.
With an ageing population, there will be fewer caregivers available and more people needing institutional treatment unless technology is better harnessed to provide the support that would help many to remain in their own homes - where they generally want to be. "There are statistics that show Alzheimer's could bankrupt the country - that's just one disease," Dishman said.
"The impact of this age wave will be far greater than tsunamis, greater than [ Hurricane] Katrina. It's on the calendar, but we are doing nothing about it."
Dishman was quick to stress that the centre is not a charitable act on Intel's part - the company wants to help create a market and make money (though he noted that the company does have a sense of social responsibility as an employer, as a third of Intel employees look after an ageing parent).
But at the same time, he said it is shocking that Intel is currently the largest funder of research in the world into independent living - represented entirely by the research done in Dublin.
"That's not an indication of how much we are spending. It's an indication of how little is being done," he said.
"This is not a race that we want to be winning."
He said that Intel is committed to the area and is placing significant research funding into it, not just through its own research but also through its capital investment arm, which can fund small companies developing products in the market.
The Dublin TRIL Centre is a key part of assistive technology investment and development for Intel.
"Our goal is to make Ireland the largest testbed in the world to try out these technologies," he explained. Trialling technologies need to be scaled up from the typical 10 or 20 that might test something out, to thousands of homes, or they will be unlikely to be commercialised.
But why put so much effort and funding into a centre that will serve a population of only four million? "Because it can have a much more global impact," he said.
There are several conditions that appear with greater frequency in the Celtic genome, he says, and because so many around the world can claim Irish descent, Irish research can affect some 90 million people.
Intel also chose to put TRIL here because Ireland, through the Government and Enterprise Ireland, has "a tradition of funding small start-ups".
