Innovation by Design: Inside the Longitude Prize on Dementia

Chiara De Poli, Martin Knapp, Valentina Zigante, Juliette Malley

The winner of the £1 million Longitude Prize on Dementia was announced in March 2026, marking the culmination of a multi-year competition aimed at finding breakthrough assistive technologies for people living with dementia.

Twenty-four semi-finalist teams were whittled down to five finalists, and one technology ultimately took the crown: the AI-powered CrossSense smart glasses that help users recognise objects and people, supporting them in their daily activities.

Our team from the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre at LSE was asked to bring to the Prize our expertise in dementia care and digital innovation in social care to conduct an evaluation of the five finalist technologies, independent of the management and support processes for the Prize and, of course, independent of the finalist teams’ activities. Our findings were then fed to the Judging Panel of international experts who selected the Prize winner.

From this privileged standpoint we were able to observe how the innovation processes around dementia care technologies unfolded under prize conditions. Our experience raised broader questions about how care technologies are developed, adopted, and scaled in real-world settings. In this blog we reflect on these questions after briefly tracing the history of the Longitude Prize.

A Prize with historic roots

The Longitude Prize has a long and storied lineage. Its name traces back to 1714, when the British government launched what is widely considered the first innovation award in history - a prize of £20,000 (about £4m today) for anyone who could solve the problem of determining a ship's longitude at sea. The prize emerged in response to a growing navigation crisis, and it worked: the competition galvanised scientific attention and produced a solution whose core principles are effectively still in use today.

Three centuries later, the spirit of that original challenge was revived. In 2014, an £8 million Longitude Prize was launched to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR) - a problem whose solution was identified as having enormous social value, but which was attracting relatively little private investment. The Longitude Prize on AMR was designed as an open innovation competition, deliberately structured to level the playing field and invite disruptive start-ups and new entrants who might otherwise be overlooked by traditional grant funding. That prize was awarded in 2024.

The second Longitude Prize followed in September 2022, this time turning its focus to dementia - a growing global health issue still without a cure. Currently available medications help slow the progression of some types of dementia, but the mainstay of support remains person-centred care: practical, emotional, and social support, ideally tailored to the individual and their families. Assistive care technology has a growing role to play in delivering that support for people living with dementia at scale, yet it has historically attracted far less research and commercial investment^{2 3} than the social and economic burden of dementia warrants.

The Longitude Prize on Dementia had the ambition to help redress this trend. Its goal was to drive the creation of personalised, technology-based tools that are co-created with people living with the early stages of dementia, helping them live independent, more fulfilled lives so they are able to do the things they enjoy.

Over more than three years, the Prize supported teams of innovators competing for the £1 million grand prize. Throughout the competition, the teams received monetary awards and non-financial support - in areas such as marketing, technical development, and regulatory compliance - to help them develop breakthrough solutions and credible commercial strategies to bring those solutions to the market.

Questions raised by the Longitude Prize on Dementia

Whilst the Prize represented an important opportunity to support innovation in an area that has long been overlooked, it was not a magic fix. Our involvement surfaced several questions that extend beyond dementia and speak to the broader challenge of developing, implementing, and scaling care technologies.

The first, and most pressing, question is what happens when care technologies are used under real-life conditions. An enormous amount of work went into 'dementia-proofing' the technologies competing for the Prize. Yet products that developers consider straightforward can still fall short if the people using them, whether people with dementia or family carers, are not able to engage with them confidently. Even the most thoughtfully co-designed product carries some built-in assumptions about users' digital literacy, cognitive capacity, or the availability of ongoing support from family or professionals. How technologies are embedded in people's lives, and whether their benefits are sustained over time, are implementation challenges distinct from the innovation challenges the Prize was designed to address, but they are just as consequential.

Adoption barriers exist for service providers too, particularly in publicly funded systems. Local authorities, home care agencies, and care homes face their own obstacles to bringing these technologies in, for example in relation to procurement processes and integration with existing care routines. If not addressed, these issues risk technology failure, and undermine technology's potential to reach users, particularly those currently underserved by existing care provision.

If the first question concerns implementation and adoption, the second concerns the experience of innovating under prize conditions - something we still know relatively little about. Innovation prizes are intended to shape behaviour: they encourage competition, create milestones, and provide incentives to focus effort in particular directions. Yet we have limited understanding of how these dynamics influence innovation in practice. How did the rules and rhythms of the Prize shape the way teams thought and worked? What did they prioritise, and what did they set aside? How did the financial and non-financial support offered by the Prize influence teams' innovation processes? To what extent did the Prize create the conditions for people with dementia to be meaningfully involved in shaping the technologies designed to support them?

The third question concerns the innovation model itself. Unlike conventional research grants, which tend to favour established institutions and well-trodden methodological paths, the Longitude Prize on Dementia was intended to open the door to start-ups, social enterprises, and independent innovators who might otherwise struggle to secure support. Its aim was not simply to reward promising ideas, but to provide the funding, networks, and practical support needed to accelerate development, strengthen commercial viability, and make emerging technologies more attractive to potential investors. A key question - one that can only be answered over the longer term - is whether the Prize ultimately lived up to this ambition and succeeded in stimulating innovation in a field that has historically been underfunded

These questions are now the focus of ongoing research and evaluation, and the answers are likely to have implications well beyond the Longitude Prize on Dementia.

Why the answers matter beyond dementia

The Longitude Prize on Dementia was both a response to chronic underinvestment in assistive care technologies and an experiment in doing innovation differently. It brought together funders, prize administrators, expert judges, technology developers, non-financial support providers, and - crucially - people living with dementia, their families, unpaid carers, and dementia advocates into a single competition framework. Placing end users at the heart of the process was not incidental; it reflected a commitment to inclusive innovation.

Equally important was the recognition that innovators often need more than funding alone. The Prize combined financial resources with practical support intended to strengthen the skills, networks, and capabilities needed to bring new technologies to market.

Now, whether CrossSense and the other finalist solutions actually improve the lives of people with dementia at scale depends on the questions this blog has raised: whether people and providers can use them with confidence, whether the solutions reflect what people actually need and want, and whether the Prize set the innovators up on a sustainable innovation and commercialisation path.

These questions extend well beyond dementia care. Policymakers, funders, and innovators across health and social care face similar challenges when designing technologies for complex real-world environments marked by inequality, resource constraints, and digital divides. Assistive technologies cannot replace the human relationships that underpin good care, but they can support and strengthen them. Ultimately, the measure of success is not whether a technology can be developed, but whether it reaches the people who need it and improves their lives in meaningful and lasting ways.

1 Challengeworks Finalists Announced

2 Alzheimer's UK Longitude Prize Blog

3 Global status report on the public health response to dementia