BalanceBuddy Brings Falls-Prevention Data to Aged Care Homes

A new partnership is bringing falls-prevention technology into Australian aged care homes through an unlikely device: a game controller you stand on. The Wellness Partners Foundation, founded by pharmacist Michael Bonner, has teamed up with Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) to roll out a gamified balance tool called BalanceBuddy, announced in June 2026.

The concept is refreshingly simple. Residents step on a touch-sensitive floor mat that acts as a game controller, connected by Bluetooth to a TV. From there, they play games designed to train both body and brain at once — stomping on-screen cockroaches, or working through Frogger and Tetris-style challenges that reward quick, accurate stepping.

Wellness Partners says it has relationships with more than 600 aged care homes and plans to provide the system to those providers at no cost. The device is intended for communal and TV-room areas, where the foundation hopes it will do double duty: sharpen residents' balance while drawing them together socially and easing isolation.

BalanceBuddy is not a novelty. It is built on years of research from NeuRA and UNSW Sydney into a step-exergame called smart±step. The underlying idea is what researchers call 'choice-step reaction time' training — the split-second physical and cognitive work of deciding where to step, and stepping there accurately, that older adults rely on every day to stay upright.

The evidence behind it is substantial. A NeuRA-led randomised controlled trial of smart±step, published in Nature Medicine and led by Dr Daina Sturnieks within NeuRA's Falls, Balance and Injury group — where Professor Stephen Lord is a leading figure — followed community-dwelling adults over 65. Those who played the exergame for around 120 minutes a week had 26% fewer falls over 12 months compared with a control group.

For older Australians, that result matters. Falls are a major burden, and a measurable reduction over a full year is the kind of outcome that genuinely changes lives and reduces pressure on care teams.

What makes the aged care deployment distinctive is who is standing alongside the device. Wellness Partners' embedded onsite pharmacists are set to train staff on the system — and, crucially, to use the gameplay and score data it generates.

The intent is to turn play into insight. As residents step through games week after week, their scores and reaction patterns become a stream of data that pharmacists can use to help monitor falls risk over time. The foundation also sees it as a way to potentially flag the impact of medication changes — for example, if a resident's stepping performance shifts after a new prescription.

That is a thoughtful design. It treats BalanceBuddy not just as exercise, but as a continuous signal about how steady a resident is on any given week.

Here is the catch that every provider should sit with: a balance score, by itself, prevents nothing. A falling reaction-time number on a Tuesday is only useful if someone can connect it to everything else happening in that resident's care.

Falls are rarely caused by one thing. They sit at the intersection of balance, medications, recent incidents, mobility notes, vision, hydration and more. The promise of flagging a medication's impact only works if the gameplay data sits next to the medication record — and if a sudden dip in scores can be read alongside last month's incident reports and the clinical notes from the care team.

In most aged care organisations, those pieces live in separate systems. The exergame data is in one place, medications in the pharmacy or clinical system, incidents in a register, and progress notes somewhere else again. When the data is scattered, the human insight that BalanceBuddy is supposed to enable becomes slow, manual work — or simply doesn't happen. The signal is there, but no one can see the whole picture in time to act.

BalanceBuddy is a welcome addition to the falls-prevention toolkit, and the evidence behind it is real. But the lesson for providers extends well beyond one device. Every new tool you adopt — a balance game, a wearable, a new clinical system — generates its own pool of data. On its own, each pool is interesting. Connected, they become genuinely powerful.

The difference between a stepping score and a prevented fall is context: balance trends read against medication changes, incident history and clinical notes, all in one place. That only happens when your data is brought together rather than left siloed across the systems that created it.

This is the foundation Intellova is built to provide — unifying business and care data from your many tools into a single, AI-ready database. When the gameplay data, the medication records and the incident reports all live together, your team (and the technology that supports them) can finally see the patterns that matter. New tools like BalanceBuddy deliver their full value not when they're plugged in, but when their data is connected to everything else you already know.