Cherish Health
Cherish Health detects falls and activity by bouncing radar off people, with no camera and nothing worn. Cherish Serenity is a device shaped like an old transistor radio that sits in the corner of a room, plugs in, and senses through walls, covering multiple rooms and multiple people from a single unit; the company describes it as using patented radar technology and AI to track body position and activity, detect falls, and notify caregivers or a response center. Its privacy policy lists heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature among the sensor data it collects.
The discrimination problem is the interesting part of the engineering. A person lowering themselves to the floor and a person falling produce similar endpoints, and the company has described separating them by reading body position through the descent, and catching a fall broken by grabbing a table, which a wearable accelerometer misses. The chief executive has described reading heart rate and respiration from 40 feet through two walls as demonstrated in the company's own laboratory rather than published. No accuracy figure or study is published for any function.
The privacy argument is the commercial argument: radar produces no image, so nothing resembling video of a person in a bedroom or bathroom exists.
Distribution runs through partners. AT&T supplies cellular connectivity by default, Alarm.com carries the Serenity Enterprise Hub to its service provider network for facilities, and security dealers sell and install to consumers. A partnership with Health eVillages placed devices at a Massachusetts veterans center. Launch coverage in January 2024 reported roughly $250 to $300 for the device and $39 a month.
Founded by Sumit Nagpal, with offices in Boston and Sevenoaks, Kent. The company reports raising $26 million without venture capital, with a further round planned.
Capability Axes
An AI Health Index grade measures what a buyer can verify from public sources on the date shown. It is not a rating of how good the product is. A vendor can build an excellent system and grade low on an axis because it publishes nothing an outsider can check. How grades read
Radar returns reflected energy and nothing else, so every useful output is inference on that signal. The company describes Cherish Serenity as using patented radar technology and AI to detect falls and track body position and activity across multiple rooms and people without cameras, notifying caregivers or a response center, and its privacy policy lists heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature among the sensor data it collects. At launch the company described the model to TechCrunch (9 January 2024): Serenity builds "a 13-point skeleton model of individuals in near-real-time, using radar data processed by AI on the device", tracks up to two people within a 40 foot range through walls, and uses the sequence of movements to tell a deliberate lie down from a fall, including slow falls a wearable accelerometer misses. Estimating a skeleton from radar is a learned model, and it runs on the hub.
The hub is sold for what that model produces: fall, position and activity detection with caregiver notification. There is no separate hardware, nurse call or monitoring business that carries value without it.
The company's own pages do not describe what the models were trained on, their accuracy, or how they are updated.
The device detects and notifies and a person acts, and no measure of either is published. The company's launch release says Serenity can notify caregivers or a response center for timely help, and the device takes no clinical action. The company has described separating deliberate descents from falls to avoid alarms each time someone sits on the floor, which is a false alarm control built into a safety product. There is no published fall detection sensitivity, false alarm rate or alert volume, and nothing on what happens after a missed fall, so the threshold and the after the fact check are both missing.
The approach is described in general terms and nothing under it is identified. The company names radar sensing with AI, multi room and multi person coverage from one unit, and the targets: falls, body position, activity, and in its privacy policy heart rate and respiratory rate. It has described the hard cases the classification is built for, a deliberate descent against a fall and a fall broken by grabbing furniture, and a range of 40 feet through two walls for vital signs. No model type, training data, detection rate, false alarm rate, radar band, versioning or update practice is published.
The models are the company's own and the delivery partners are named. Cherish describes its radar technology and AI as patented and its own, so no outside model provider is named or implied in the path from sensor to alert. AT&T is named for connectivity, Alarm.com for the enterprise platform and its service provider network, and security dealers for sales and installation, and the privacy policy names its web analytics and messaging providers (Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mixpanel, Intercom, Facebook, Twitter). Not named: the cloud host, the radar chipset supplier, and which partners receive event or vital sign data.
No named deployment result and no performance figure a reader can check. No peer reviewed publication, clinical study, independent evaluation or accuracy figure is published for any function. What exists is channel breadth: AT&T connectivity, Alarm.com carrying the enterprise product, security dealers, and a placement at a Massachusetts veterans center through Health eVillages, which shows organizations willing to carry the product rather than whether it detects falls reliably.
The through wall heart rate and respiration capability has been described by the chief executive as demonstrated in the company's own laboratory, which is an engineering milestone and not field evidence.
The sensing choice removes images, and the privacy policy's commitments are general. Radar produces no picture, so no image of a person undressed, bathing or asleep ever exists to leak or be viewed. The privacy policy (Cherish Health, Inc., effective December 2020) covers the website, app, hardware and care solutions, lists sensor data such as heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature and medical history data, allows use for research and development to improve the service, allows de-identified or aggregated data to be shared for business purposes, and keeps data as long as necessary; it still cites Privacy Shield for European transfers. Nothing states whether device data trains the models, what leaves the device, or a retention period. Safety engineering, such as how a false or missed fall alert is handled, is not published.
A service level privacy document is published and no HIPAA status is stated. The privacy policy (effective December 2020) covers the website, app, hardware, software and care solutions, and lists medical history and sensor data such as heart rate and respiratory rate, but does not mention HIPAA, business associate status or protected health information.
The channel makes the status matter: a consumer buying from a security dealer sits outside HIPAA, where protection is what the privacy policy grants, while a nursing home deployment through Alarm.com's providers may sit inside it, and nothing distinguishes the two.
Nothing independent is published about security. The privacy policy says the company uses safeguards but cannot guarantee security, and names no encryption practice, attestation or certification; there is no security page, trust center, penetration testing statement or vulnerability disclosure policy.
The surface is an always on radio sensor in bedrooms, on a cellular link that bypasses household or facility network controls, installed by third party dealers whose accounts and provisioning credentials sit between the company and the monitored person. Device authentication, firmware signing and update practice are unaddressed.
No device claim is made, and a vital signs capability sits beside the safety positioning without a stated position. The product is framed as safety monitoring and fall detection for independent living and facilities, the route conventional personal emergency response products take, and the website terms say the site gives no medical advice.
The privacy policy lists heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature among the sensor data collected, and the company has described reading heart rate and respiration through walls, while its launch release names only falls, body position and activity. Whether vital signs ship as a monitored parameter, sit as a laboratory capability, or appear only as wellness information is not stated, and contactless vital sign measurement is an active area of device regulation.
Nothing is published on how the models are governed or tested. No fairness testing, subgroup performance, calibration data, validation method, drift monitoring or external audit appears in the company's materials. The bias mechanism in radar sensing is physical: the reflected return varies with body size, composition and posture, a wheelchair is a large metal reflector that dominates the scene, and walkers, adjustable beds, oxygen concentrators and mobility scooters put moving or static metal in exactly the rooms the device watches. Residents of assisted living and nursing homes disproportionately use those aids, and the people most likely to fall are the least likely to move like a typical training subject.
Nothing published covers what happens when the device misses a fall. The only terms on the company's site (terms of use, December 2020) govern the website: they say it provides no medical advice, direct users to call 911 in an emergency, disclaim warranties and cap liability at $100. No terms for the device or the monitoring service, detection warranty, service level, uptime commitment or remediation position are published for consumers or facilities.
A missed fall for someone living alone is harm measured in hours on a floor, and with no detection rate published a family cannot size the risk of replacing a pendant with an ambient sensor. The channel spreads responsibility further: a security dealer sells and installs, AT&T carries the connection, Alarm.com carries the enterprise product, and Cherish supplies the device.
No clinical integration exists to verify. The integrations published are connectivity and security infrastructure: AT&T carries the connection, Alarm.com carries the enterprise product to its service providers, and security dealers install. No record system integration, interface standard, published API or marketplace listing is described.
A fall detected at three in the morning that never reaches the resident's record is available to whoever answered the alert and to nobody afterward, which removes it from care planning and incident review.
A single hosted service behind a device on cellular connectivity, with no location committed. Serenity is placed in a corner and plugged in, connects over AT&T cellular by default rather than household broadband, and an Enterprise Hub serves facilities through Alarm.com's service provider network.
The privacy policy names the company's United States and United Kingdom offices and refers to standard contractual clauses for European users, but names no host, region, residency commitment or tenancy model, and the company's pages do not say which classification runs on the device and which in the cloud.
A consumer price exists in launch coverage rather than on the company's site, and everything above the consumer tier is undisclosed. Coverage of the January 2024 launch reported the device at roughly $250 to $300 with a $39 monthly subscription, which gives a family a capital and running cost and a unit; the home page publishes no price.
The figures are over two years old against a product that has since gained an enterprise hub, the installing dealer sets the price a buyer pays along with any installation and monitoring charges, and nothing says whether the cellular connection is inside the subscription. Facility pricing for the Enterprise Hub is unpublished.
Settings are named broadly and end deployments are almost entirely unnamed. The company addresses aging adults at home and enterprises through the Enterprise Hub, and its partners take it to security dealers' consumers and to facilities through Alarm.com's service providers; multi person, multi room sensing puts a spouse or a shared room within scope.
The clearest named deployment is a veterans center placement through Health eVillages; nothing states how many facilities run it, at what scale, or with what results. The clinical scope is narrow by design: falls, body position, activity and vital signs.
Alternatives to Cherish Health
Vendors in the same categories as Cherish Health whose graded profiles look most alike, with a line on what each product does.
Similar is not the same, so check that each one does the job you need. No vendor pays for placement.
Honor Technology runs the Honor Care Platform, the operating platform behind two home care networks for older adults: independent agencies in the Honor Care Network and the Home Instead…
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Aloe Care Health rebuilt the medical alert pendant around voice and sensors.
Sensi.AI sells audio based monitoring and AI agents to home care agencies.
Ordered by how closely the graded profiles match across the fifteen axes, inside the same categories. See how each axis is graded in the methodology.
Pricing
Vendor-published figures are labeled as such. Figures labeled “Estimated” are derived from third-party sources and have not been confirmed by the vendor.
| Entry Price | Pricing Basis | BAA Tier | Implementation | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Approximately $250 to $300 for the device plus $39 per month, reported at the January 2024 consumer launch rather than published as a current rate; enterprise and facility pricing not published
$39 baseline
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Hardware purchase plus a recurring subscription per device, evidenced on the consumer side and unstated for enterprise. The device is bought outright and a monthly subscription sustains the service, with the subscribing unit being the device rather than the person, which matters because one unit is claimed to cover multiple rooms and multiple people. Whether facilities are charged per device, per room, per resident or per building is unstated, as is whether cellular connectivity is bundled into the subscription or billed by the carrier. | Not published. The privacy policy covers the hardware and care solutions without stating HIPAA or business associate status. A consumer buying through a security dealer sits outside HIPAA, where protection is what the privacy policy grants; a nursing home deployment may sit inside it; nothing distinguishes the two. Ask which deployments the company treats as covered and whether it signs agreements with facility operators. | Not published by the company, and in practice set by installing security dealers for consumers. For facility deployments nothing is published on site survey, device placement or commissioning, which is where the cost of a multi room deployment would sit. | Third Party Estimated |
A consumer price exists in launch coverage rather than on the company's site.
Coverage of the January 2024 launch reported roughly $250 to $300 for the device with a subscription of $39 per month, which gives a family both the capital cost and the running cost.
Three things weaken it. The numbers are over two years old against a product that has since gained an enterprise hub. Distribution runs through security dealers, so the price a buyer pays is set by an installing dealer, and installation, activation and monitoring charges layered by that dealer are invisible from outside. And connectivity is cellular by default, with nothing stating whether the subscription includes it.
Enterprise pricing is absent. Facility deployments run through an Enterprise Hub distributed by Alarm.com's service providers, and nothing indicates whether a nursing home is charged per device, per room, per resident or per building. The economic argument for ambient radar is that one unit covers several rooms, and without a stated device count per unit of floor area a facility cannot compare it against alternatives on cost.
Ask for a current rate card, whether the subscription includes cellular service, devices required per typical facility floor, and the enterprise pricing basis.