Community workers on Jiangsu Street in Shanghai recently fixed a smart device on water taps of elderly residents living alone. If an elderly resident uses less than 0.01 cubic meter of water in about 12 hours, the metered device will automatically send an alarm to the community workers, who will then rush to check if the elderly person is okay.

Reports say the community workers also plan to install a device on the doors of senior residents staying alone to alert them if their doors remain shut for a considerable length of time.

The move has won praise on social networking sites, with many hailing it as a prime example of technology serving people and calling for its application across the country.

Smart devices indeed make our lives better, but the key element in the Shanghai experience is not technology, but the human touch.

Installing smart devices on water taps and doors is not very difficult. All one needs is a sensor, a sim card, and a coding allowing it to make calls on sensing something amiss. However, one needs to ensure that a staff worker is waiting at the other end of the system to get cracking on hearing the alarm, which could go off even late in the night or at the crack of dawn, to ensure the elderly residents have not come to any harm.

To ensure the system works smoothly, a community worker or several of them have to be there on standby 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Therefore, it is the community workers, and not so much the smart devices, which play the most important part in the whole arrangement by caring for the elderly.

Of course, the contribution of those who came up with the idea should not be forgotten. It might be a good idea to reward them, so that they can be encouraged to do even better.