Our commitments to care

The idea behind CrossSense has been maturing for more than a decade, but our company is young. We incorporated last year and have been picking up pace since winning the Longitude Prize on Dementia in March. Growing quickly brings new pressures, and we wanted to be sure that what matters most to us, and to the people we serve, cannot be traded away lightly.

In June we completed the Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) Tech for Good programme, which took us through every part of our young business, from what we offer to how we are governed. It was the perfect moment to make our mission binding. Emboldened by Eric Ries's excellent book Incorruptible, which shows how companies can effectively protect their purpose as they grow, we worked with the brilliant solicitors at Bates Wells to rewrite our Articles of Association: the legal rules that set out what our company exists to do and how it is run.

Our mission, to “enhance human potential through independent and fulfilling daily living”, and the three principles that guide how we pursue it, are now written into those Articles. Changing them requires the unanimous agreement of our directors and of all our voting shareholders. Each year we must report on how we have advanced and protected our mission. We are now writing a policy for implementing the principles, so that they guide everyday decisions and are not just aspirations. Below, we explain what each principle means in plain words, and what it looked like in practice in September.

You can find the legal text of our principles at the end of this article.

Our first principle is that CrossSense must support people's own abilities and independence, and must never turn into a tool for control.

September was World Alzheimer's Month, and it was packed with events full of hope. At the Alzheimer's Society Annual Conference, defiant speakers set out a vision of fighting dementia at every level: prevention, earlier diagnosis, drugs that slow the disease, perhaps even a cure emerging on the horizon. Much of this effort still pushes against the decline of public social care and persistent stigma, yet in the innovation zone, where we exhibited among other inspiring startups, hope continued to beam throughout the day. We are very grateful to the Alzheimer's Society innovation team, who keep making space for innovators like us.

Most technologies for dementia still focus on monitoring, but we have never met a person living with dementia who liked feeling controlled. We understand the dread that loved ones feel when they do not know what the person they care for may be doing, particularly from far away. Yet no technology to date has delivered transformative benefits for both people living with dementia and the people who love them. Our approach is to put the agency of the person living with dementia first, in everything we build. We believe this will benefit those around them too.

CrossSense does not surveil people living with dementia from the outside in. Working from smart glasses, it senses the world from their point of view and supports them from the inside out. And while we recognise the inevitable trajectory of dementia once it touches a person, we aim to use the scientific principles behind CrossSense so that its benefits persist even after the glasses come off. We continue to build that evidence through our research study funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and we are already designing the next one.

Our second principle is focused on generating revenue in ways that respect our users' trust, privacy and dignity. We will never sell our users' identifiable data, use it for targeted advertising, or make money by building dependence on CrossSense.

Over the years, we have learned how strongly people living with dementia and their carers feel about how their data is used. Smart glasses can capture a lot of information, some of which can be sensitive, so wherever possible we avoid collecting it in the first place. We keep raw audio and video for a very limited time, only so that we can respond to safety concerns, and our glasses function only in and around a person's home, so we do not risk recording people in public who are unaware of being filmed. We recently completed the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) Regulatory Sandbox, which had very helpfully shaped these policies.

We will not trade on user attention. Many apps use deceptive design to keep people using the product, because every extra minute of attention can be sold to advertisers. We have ruled that out in our Articles, because we rely on an intimate, trust-based relationship with our users. We commit resources to building a durable, evidence-based product so that CrossSense is measured by the value it creates through helping people keep their independence and dignity in daily life.

Keeping these promises also depends on where data is stored and who controls the computers that process it. People tell us they want their data kept safely in the UK, but the specialised servers that AI needs are in short supply here outside a handful of global technology giants. So it was very encouraging to attend Civo Navigate in London last month, the conference run by the sovereignty-focused UK cloud provider Civo. We have just joined Civo's generous and collaborative startup programme. Their servers already power our current research study, and we are working towards launching CrossSense on their infrastructure.

In the same spirit, we are building relationships with several smart glasses makers, so that CrossSense continues to support a wide range of devices in this maturing ecosystem. Whichever glasses it runs on, the data stays under the control of the person who wears them, and of the family members or carers they choose to involve.

Our third principle commits us to fair, lasting relationships with the communities who helped build CrossSense, and to finding effective ways to give back.

CrossSense will only stay relevant to the people we serve if we stay close to those communities. Ultimately, people tell us what to make: co-design with more than 300 people, including people living with dementia, carers, care workers and clinicians, has shaped every aspect of CrossSense.

We always see a person living with dementia as a capable member of a community. Across the country, in dementia cafés and improvised meeting spaces, we have met many brilliant volunteers who inspired us with their ideas and resolve. We believe every single person can contribute meaningfully to their local community, and there is solid evidence that doing so benefits cognitive function and wellbeing.

Leading Lives, a Suffolk-based employee-owned care co-operative, has been our long-standing partner, opening doors to memory cafés we could not otherwise have reached. In 2023 and 2024, when our glasses were still large and heavy and we could not yet demonstrate a compelling prototype, they introduced us to many wonderful people who selflessly helped shape CrossSense, knowing it might not reach them in time. That fearlessness, and a generosity that extends beyond one's own lifespan, has deepened our commitment to the dementia community.

So on September 25th we were proud to sponsor and present the Values in Action award at the Leading Lives Annual General Meeting and Awards Night in Stowmarket, recognising one of their many inspiring care practitioners for bringing the co-operative's values to life in their everyday work.

In September we also joined broader, industry-focused networks, including the NVIDIA Inception programme and the Personal AI Health Alliance. As we grow, we remain committed to the communities who made CrossSense possible, and to finding more ways to reciprocate their support.

What connects all three principles is that, for us, care is an everyday practice. We did not set out to create a product and hand it over. It has evolved over the years, and we want it to continue doing so after its release. We want our companion to adapt to people over time, to pay attention, be there to try things, to tinker alongside people, to step in where it is needed, and to step back where it is not. The point was never to replace anyone's capabilities, but to rebalance the distribution of care effort towards what is meaningful. CrossSense exists to return time and attention to the parts of life that matter, like the conversation with your partner at the kitchen table, playing with the grandchild or visiting the neighbour.

We have been earning trust by showing up, openly sharing our progress, and being willing to be challenged by families, by carers, by the communities that host us, and by each other within our team. Smart glasses are still a new kind of technology, with no settled way of doing things. We have been discovering its most effective capabilities by treating the people who use it as our peers and teachers. In the end, we can only verify that CrossSense really works in their homes. There is lots to do. We are advancing our product features as fast as we can, and we put reliability first, so our companion is dependable when it launches.

Article 2.2 of the CrossSense Articles of Association

2.2.1 User agency and dignity: The Company shall design, develop and deploy its products and services in a manner that supports users' own capabilities and agency, and shall not make any material change to its products or services that would cause their primary purpose to shift from empowering user agency to passive monitoring, surveillance and/or unnecessary dependency.

2.2.2 Ethical revenue and data stewardship: The Company shall pursue sustainable commercial revenue in a manner consistent with user benefit, trust, privacy and dignity. To this effect, the Company shall not sell identifiable user data, use user data for targeted advertising or monetise user attention through advertising-led or engagement-maximising business models.

2.2.3 Community reciprocity: The Company shall maintain active, fair and reciprocal relationships with the communities it serves, including but not limited to users, carers, researchers, care organisations and grassroots initiatives. In pursuing this principle, the Company shall have regard to appropriate opportunities to reciprocate the valued contributions of these communities through partnership, research participation, feedback, access, expertise, donations and/or other forms of support.