For 1 in 7 seniors, even eating can be a challenge due to dysphagia

There’s a quiet, often overlooked challenge facing a growing number of Singaporeans—one that strikes at the very core of everyday life: the ability to eat.

Many of us see food as something we can relish, from its colours and smells to its taste, and we often take it for granted. 

But for an estimated one in seven older adults in Singapore, or around 174,000 seniors, eating is far from simple enjoyment. These individuals struggle with a condition called dysphagia, the medical term for difficulty chewing or swallowing, which can turn meals into a daily challenge.

In recent years, there have been initiatives trying to make dining more inclusive for people with dysphagia, but how effective are they?

When a bite becomes a risk

Dysphagia isn’t solved just by “eating slower.”

As muscles involved in swallowing weaken with age or due to degenerative diseases, food can accidentally enter the airway instead of the oesophagus. This can lead to choking, dehydration, aspiration pneumonia, and, in the worst cases, malnutrition.

Eating, for many seniors, is no longer automatic and requires more attention—the texture, moisture, and composition of the food matter altogether.

By 2030, one in four Singaporeans will be over 65, meaning the number of people affected by dysphagia will grow significantly—and it could affect anyone.

Eating doesn’t just happen in hospitals. It happens at hawker centres, coffee shops, and family dinners. Yet most food spaces are built on a silent assumption: everyone can chew and swallow. That assumption works until it doesn’t. 

Despite its prevalence, dysphagia has remained a silent problem in Singapore’s food culture until recently.

Early trials to address dysphagia

Singapore has taken steps in recent years to address the problem.

In 2021, Alexandra Hospital’s speech therapists trained 24 hawkers in Queenstown to chop, mince, or blend dishes on request, giving people with dysphagia access to familiar hawker food safely and without extra charge.

The initiative was just the first part of a broader landscape of awareness and the standardisation of providing dysphagia-friendly options beyond hospitals.

In 2022, the Ministry of Health’s EatSafe SG programme adopted the International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative (IDDSI) framework to standardise textures and training, reducing the risk of choking in healthcare and community care settings.

Moreover, since 2023, organisations like St Luke’s Hospital started offering hands‑on workshops to equip healthcare and food preparation staff with the skills to prepare and test texture‑modified meals for individuals with dysphagia.

In 2024, aligned with national efforts such as EatSafe SG, the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) partnered with Hong Kong-based social enterprise Project Futurus to pilot the Sensory Restaurant on Wheels initiative, a sensory-led, immersive dim sum dining experience for over 90 seniors, 120 care sector stakeholders, and 60 volunteers.

Alongside three elderly care operators—Catholic Welfare Services’ St. Joseph’s Home, Methodist Welfare Services Bethany Nursing Home, and Salvation Army Peacehaven Nursing Home—SUSS and Project Futurus also introduced another initiative: the Captain Softmeal™ programme, teaching participants to prepare softmeal versions of familiar local dishes while retaining flavour and appearance.

Using Japanese softmeal enzyme techniques, local meals are safe to swallow and, most importantly, still enjoyable.

Mainstream adoption

Despite these efforts, there’s no doubt that mainstream eateries have traditionally offered few options for those with dysphagia who would like to dine out, limiting social participation and nutritional intake.

Early this year, Singapore took another step toward changing that.

Building on its previous efforts, SUSS piloted dysphagia-friendly menus in mainstream restaurants such as Imperial Treasure and 5 Senses Café & Restaurant. Seniors enjoyed familiar dishes—Hokkien Mee, stewed beancurd with minced beef, kaya toast—over a two-day pop-up from 12–13 Jan 2026.

Dishes were thoughtfully reimagined as soft meals by chefs to be easier and safer to swallow without compromising taste, presentation, or dining experience. Following IDDSI guidelines, chefs adjusted softness, moisture, and cohesiveness so that food neither crumbles dangerously nor flows too quickly.

The impact goes beyond safety. When one person at the table struggles with swallowing, the social experience changes.

By modifying textures, the initiative allows seniors to dine out socially, with family and friends, while ensuring they receive adequate nutrition and enjoy their meals. This is a promising alternative to the usual porridge and oatmeal, and it preserves dignity and participation at the table.

5 Senses’ co-founder, Shaun Foo, shared a personal anecdote from his wife’s grandfather, who said, “I’m just waiting to die [because of the lack of food options available for dysphagia patients].” 

This is why he believes that food is “more than nourishment,”— working on this pilot has allowed the 5 Senses team to better understand the needs of diners with swallowing difficulties. “It has shown us that we can tune our preparation and service processes—making dining out a more inclusive experience without altering the essence of it,” he added.

Following the pilot, participating restaurants may continue or adapt these offerings in ways that best suit their operations and customers.

Widespread adoption is easier said than done

The widespread adoption of dysphagia-friendly meals is easier said than done.

It is more than mashed ingredients—under IDDSI guidelines, food must hold its shape without crumbling, remain moist enough to swallow safely, and avoid breaking into unpredictable pieces.

It’s a lot of work for chefs—they would have to adjust cooking times, moisture levels, binding, and plating, all while preserving flavour and visual appeal. In addition, time needs to be spent training staff to understand and handle these new requirements.

Given that restaurants typically operate in a high-pressure environment, introducing new menu categories or specialised preparation can pose practical operational challenges. Hence, whether dysphagia-friendly dining can be maintained broadly outside pilot settings remains to be seen.

But there’s reason for optimism. The SUSS’s initiatives have already engaged over 3,000 beneficiaries across its community programmes. The pilot demonstrates a proof of concept, drawing on research, care services, and F&B partners to lay the groundwork for mainstream adoption as Singapore prepares for a super-aged society.

As Singapore heads toward 2030, the question is no longer whether dysphagia will affect someone we know, but whether our food culture, chefs, and dining spaces are ready when it does.

• Read more stories we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

News arrived this week of new Panasonic TVs, announced at the company’s Experience Event held on the outskirts of Munich, but new TVs weren’t the main focus as a big change was taking place at the event.

Panasonic had entered into a strategic partnership with Shenzen Skyworth Display Technology Ltd.

While that doesn’t sound massive, it is rather sizeable. Much like the Sony and TCL partnership that was announced earlier in 2026, it’s another brand with a storied history in the home entertainment market that’s loosened its grip on its home cinema products and asked for help from others.

And I think I’m okay with it. Just about…

The fall of a giant or a Phoenix from the flames?

It would be worse, really, if Panasonic had announced that it was completely selling off its TV division. The writing was on the wall almost a year ago when there were signs that the TV division was not the profit centre that Panasonic had hoped it’d be.

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The push back into America was initially a sign of confidence that the TV division could be resurgent, but a flag that looked distinctly white was being waved around and suitors seemingly asked to come and have a peek at what Panasonic had to offer.

That Panasonic still retains an element of control is, I think, a good thing. There are still unknowns about Skyworth. I don’t believe Trusted Reviews has ever reviewed a TV from them, so I couldn’t tell what they’re like.

While I’m familiar with the name, the impression I’ve had about the brand over the years is that it is about budget and quantity, and not necessarily beating others when it comes to quality. It remains to be seen whether it can step up in that regard, and as a result, I’m sceptical. But then that should be a challenge that Skyworth rises to.

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It does offer Panasonic a production scale and possibly a marketing reach that, surprisingly for a company of Panasonic’s size, it could not achieve on its own. It’s not just ‘scale’ and ‘reach’ that Panasonic are after, but unlocking the mysteries of producing TVs at a lower price that its Chinese rivals have figured out.

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I’m always worried when the word DNA is invoked, as it was a few times during Panasonic’s Plenary session, as it never really reassures.

DNA is the word you don’t want people to bring up, as it inevitably sparks questions about what a company’s DNA is and answers that wildly diverge based on what people think of the brand. What a company’s DNA is known is not necessarily what it was twenty years ago.

If Panasonic knew what its own DNA was, wouldn’t it know how to fix the problem and not seek a transfusion from another source? Does this deal represent the fall of a giant, or are we about to see a resurrection of one? I guess it depends on your perspective and what happens next.

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So while I’m disappointed by the outcome, I’m not necessarily glum. Panasonic has made some cracking TVs – the Z90B is a recent favourite of mine –, but there’s no doubting that the sands of the TV industry have shifted, and it’s been slow to adapt.

For what it’s worth, I think the focus on premium OLED TVs was not the best move, or at least it focused on producing too many in a market segment that’s dominated by LG (and now, also, Samsung).

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I think Sony came to this realisation a few years ago and put the brakes on its OLED output and shifted to Mini LED. Panasonic needed to embrace similar change, and its 2026 TV line-up now features several Mini LED TVs, a jump from the one that was available in 2025.

The benefit, much like Sony, is that Panasonic stays in the TV market. There’s been a fair amount of talk about the Sony/TCL deal and who has ‘control’ in that partnership, but I can’t see Sony relinquishing its hold on the tech that it created, especially as it’s a step up on what TCL has developed.

The same, I think, applies to this Panasonic/Skyworth partnership, though Skyworth isn’t the equal of TCL, and it’s here where the main worry lies. Skyworth is a “top-five global TV brand” and yet I can’t think of much about them beyond budget/value TVs.

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Panasonic’s TVs stand for quality, and any drop in performance will affect the perception of the brand. Having been big names in the 90s, the Japanese TV brands have been usurped by Korea and now China. So while it’s great that the Panasonic name remains in the TV world, but if anything, the tough work of making Panasonic great again is just about to begin.

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Matthew Perks has truly outdone himself with his new invention, a highly portable powerhouse surrounded by one of the world’s brightest LEDs. The device, known as the LED supernova, takes 1.5 kilowatts of power and converts it into a dangerously eye-searing 120,000 lumens, all in a compact box weighing only 25 kg and remaining (amazingly) portable.

Perks’ idea begins with a large LED array that can produce light so bright that it’s like staring directly into the face of a rushing car; standard car headlights simply can’t compete. The difficulty is that any standard power system would have destroyed the light source long ago, so Perks had to design and build a completely new cooling / power system from scratch. This beast is made up of six copper radiators, each with three fans, resulting in a hexagonal structure with an astonishing 18 fans tied together with rubber tubing.

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The action revolves around a handcrafted hexagon-shaped metal reservoir. This item is quite adaptable; its external casing serves as a mounting platform for voltage regulator boards, allowing for rapid heat dissipation via thermal pads. The pump draws liquid from a central chamber, and a glass window provides a good view of the flow. Perks has gone above and above to ensure that all of the joints are waterproof, that there is a bleed valve to release any air pockets, and that it does not leak when the pressure is applied.

The LED is connected to a massive copper water block via soldered pipes and brackets that also function as supports, much like creating a unique suspension system for the light source. The half sphere lens and Fresnel lens function well together, capturing stray photons and directing them into the spotlight as a tight beam. The external potentiometer allows you to change the brightness using a large brass gear, and the other dial (which controls temperature) isn’t far behind.

Power comes from a huge lithium-polymer battery pack capable of producing up to 5.3 kilowatts, similar to those used in high-draw RC applications. There is a built-in management system that monitors everything and prevents negative things from happening, such as shorts, over-discharging, and excessive current. The battery pack is housed in a very handsome polished brass enclosure that not only keeps things secure but also adds some serious beauty, and six different regulator boards split the load in a way that keeps the heat at bay, with each capable of managing a surprisingly high 250 watts.

An Arduino board ensures safety by monitoring coolant flow, temperature, and pump speed. Everything operates great until it reaches its limits, at which point the entire system shuts down, cutting power quickly to save that expensive LED from blowing out in the middle of a run. He was able to put it all together using only simple hand tools such as a jigsaw for cutting brass, a vise to bend it into shape, and some careful soldering to ensure it was securely fastened. There are also 3D printed templates available to assist you mark up sheet material correctly. He even added additional straps made of leather and copper piping with handles to make the 25 kg monster more movable.

The tests show the system functioning as smoothly as a well-oiled machine, full power or not; the coolant only reaches 32 degrees Celsius, the fans spin at a cool 74%, and the LED substrate remains nice and cool at 65 degrees, well below its danger zone. No matter what strain you put on the battery, it will run for 15 minutes without blinking. That leaves plenty of time for longer demonstrations. Let’s just say that the light is very spectacular; it can light a match from 20 feet away simply by emitting photons, eliminating the need for any infrared.

When you think wearables from the likes of Google, Motorola and Samsung, you probably think earbuds and maybe watches. But in the age of AI, a whole new world of wearable tech is coming to life, and we could see these companies soon branch out to make AI-powered pins, pendants and other unexpected gadgets too.

This new generation of wearable tech will be made possible by Qualcomm, which on Monday announced the latest version of its wearables chip, the Snapdragon Wear Elite, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This new platform will be used by a range of partners, including Google, Motorola and Samsung to design a constellation of new devices.

Qualcomm’s philosophy toward wearables is very much “build it, and they will come.” It makes the underlying technology that will power devices and will then encourage companies to build on top of it how they see fit. 

When I attended the company’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii last year, Qualcomm Chief Marketing Officer Don McGuire painted me a picture of how he imagines the convergence of AI and wearables playing out.

“AI is going to be ambient in a lot of ways,” he told me. It might not even be called a “device” if it’s something woven into your clothing or worn on your person. “There’s lots of ideas out there floating around,” he said.

At the same event, Dino Bekis, who runs Qualcomm’s wearables business, introduced me to the Looki L1 — a life-logging camera created with the company’s W5 Gen 2 chip. This is the wearables platform Qualcomm introduced last year, which was designed to work with Google’s Wear OS and launched with the Pixel Watch.

Unlike its predecessor, the new Wear Elite chip will work across Google’s Wear OS, Android and Linux, with a neural processing unit that enables on-device AI with low power consumption. This is key for wearable devices, which you don’t necessarily want to charge every day. Qualcomm says the Wear Elite’s advanced power management enables 30% longer battery use, compared to the previous version, with rapid charging bringing devices to 50% in around ten minutes.

“The Snapdragon Wear Elite platform opens new possibilities, delivering the performance, battery life and connectivity essential for the next generation of Wear OS,” said Bjørn Kilburn, general manager of Wear OS by Google, in a statement.

The first devices powered by the Wear Elite chip should be available in the coming months, with Motorola saying it will use the platform to build more AI wearable devices like AI concept Project Maxwell, which it showed at CES in January, and Samsung saying it will integrate Wear Elite into the next Galaxy Watch. This will make the watch into “an even more holistic wellness companion,” said InKang Song, EVP and head of tech strategy at Samsung.

Samsung and Google might be focused on watches, but Snapdragon Wear Elite points to a future halo of personal wearables, which CNET Editor at Large Scott Stein has explored in more detail. The possibilities stretch beyond what we’ve seen so far as this latest platform is embraced by companies big and small. I’ll be looking for demos making use of the new chip this week at MWC, so stay tuned for more.

I’ve been steeling myself for a coming wave of AI-infused wearables that could be worn all over the place, based on reports on gadget plans at Meta, Google and Apple — a halo of connected tech with cameras onboard, streaming to AI services. Qualcomm’s latest chip, announced Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is built for it, and the first devices using it are coming this summer. Samsung, Google and Motorola are already building hardware with it.

I sat down with John Kehrli, senior director of product management for Qualcomm, to discuss the newest wearable chip push, and it caught my attention on several levels. The reason you should care is that this is a clear preview of tech products to come: Qualcomm’s chips power almost all of the non-Apple watches, VR headsets and smart glasses out there. 

While Qualcomm has had separate chip lines for smartwatches and for smart glasses and VR headsets, the new Snapdragon Wear Elite chip aims to bridge across categories. It’s a higher-powered watch chip filled with different wireless connection capabilities, but it is also made to support video input and streaming for AI, even 1080p video output to displays. That could include AI-infused smart glasses. 

“It’s not just the watch: for sure that’s a focus for us, but the portfolio [of devices] has expanded dramatically,” Kehrli says.

Here’s the news about Snapdragon Wear Elite that stood out for me.

A lot more onboard processing for offline AI

A big part of Qualcomm’s push on these chips is to do more generative AI and LLM work on device, a trend I expect to grow. The Snapdragon Wear Elite looks a lot more powerful than previous Qualcomm watch chips. Some of the offline, on-device functions could be voice-based AI, for fitness or, according to Qualcomm, for “life logging.” 

I’m not sure I need life logging, but I’d be interested in having more AI-based controls for wearables. The extra power looks to also drive video on displays and run onboard cameras, including video streaming. The whole idea behind next-wave multimodal AI is to have AI services be aware of what you’re doing — that’ll mostly happen via camera access. 

Kehrli says the processing cores for the neural processing unit on the Snapdragon Wear Elite could support AI models of up to 2 billion parameters on device, at about 10 tokens per second to process. He sees that being good enough for a lot of offline needs, with cloud-connected AI kicking in when needed otherwise.

Kehrli sees a lot of local AI needs for the extra sensors, including cameras, that are going to be on these wearables. “There’s so many exciting inputs coming in [to the devices]. Location, sound, voice, text, all the sensors — we’re really seeing a lot of medical-grade sensors come into the retail space. What do I do with that data?”

Cameras everywhere?

In Qualcomm’s sizzle video for the new chip, we can see a glimpse of a watch with a camera on its top edge. Most smartwatches don’t have cameras right now, but that could be changing soon. While it’s not necessarily a great way to take photos, the onboard cameras are likely more an additional way to tap into AI, like for face recognition biometrics for tap-to-pay, using a watch like a smart key for cars or other connected things, or maybe to use for other AI-based controls.

Another concept shot of a pendant, which looks basically like a neck-worn smartwatch, has its camera facing out. All the AI pins and pendants that have been trickling in these last few months are showing similar ideas. Like smart glasses, the outer-facing cameras could be another way to see things without putting something on your face. But you’d have to wear some pin or pendant.

Better battery life, faster charging, lower-power Wi-Fi connections

It also sounds like devices with these new chips will last longer on a charge. Qualcomm’s promising 30% better battery life than with its previous watch chip — potentially “days” of use. I’d still expect more or less a full day, considering these chips might also be supercharging more camera-based and AI features.

The faster charging sounds promising, though. The chips could charge devices up to 50% on 10 minutes of charging. That’s key because a lot of these wearables are being designed to be worn all the time, and some while you’re sleeping. It’s like companies are trying to find ways to do a quick recharge pit stop without spending too much time off your body.

The most interesting part could be the boosted wireless features. Qualcomm’s got six different protocols on-chip: support for Redcap 5G (a protocol to support high-speed and low-power connected tech), Bluetooth 6.0, ultra wideband, GPS, satellite-connected NB-NTN for messaging, and micropower Wi-Fi 802.11ax.

The micropower Wi-Fi support could allow these new wearables to stay Wi-Fi connected continuously, says Kehrli, letting them work in the background longer. On Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, for instance, right now, they’re mainly Bluetooth-connected and don’t stream video by default; switching to that mode kills battery life fast. Streaming always-on AI modes could last longer on Elite-powered devices.

Where they could show up: Watches, glasses, headphones, pendants, more

Qualcomm’s aiming to put its new chip across a wide range of wearables, from camera-enabled headphones and earbuds like Razer’s Motoko concept (which I tried at CES in January) to next-gen smartwatches and AI pendants, to smart glasses, and even sensor-connected bands. Devices like Meta’s neural band, which uses EMG (electromyography, using skin contact sensors) for hand gestures that control its smart glasses, could see upgrades with this chip. Maybe that’s exactly the sort of territory Meta could be exploring with its reported smartwatch debut this year.

It’s also clear that everyone, Qualcomm included, isn’t entirely sure where people prefer to wear these future AI gadgets. Is it glasses? Pendant? Watch? Headphones? All of the above? Kehrli feels people will have different preferences and will choose what works. Will that sort of redundancy make sense or settle itself down into clearer categories in another year or two?

Glasses, Kehrli adds, could be a landing spot for this chip because of the cellular-connecting possibilities, saying he expects adoption of wearables with their own data connections will keep rising, especially with AI services. “We’re seeing, on-wrist, up to 50% of customers taking connected [wearables] with a service plan. We’re seeing that dramatically increase, especially with this AI on device/off device type of experience in the cloud.”

It’s clear that halos of wearables are on deck from several big companies. How it all shakes out and works, though, is still unclear. And while these new wearables should be a lot more powerful, the focus right now isn’t on improving how they could stay connected and communicate with each other, something I got a glimpse of in a demo of a personal mesh network made by startup Ixana at CES. Maybe that’s next on deck.

For now, wearables are trying to be better extensions of your phone, first, and act better as standalone devices too.

We’ll start this week off with a bit of controversy from Linux Land. Anyone who’s ever used the sudo command knows that you don’t see any kind of visual feedback while entering your password. This was intended as a security feature, as it was believed that an on-screen indicator of how many characters had been entered would allow somebody snooping over your shoulder to figure out the length of your password. But in Ubuntu 26.04, that’s no longer the case. The traditional sudo binary has been replaced with a one written in Rust, which Canonical has recently patched to follow the modern convention of showing asterisks on the password prompt.

As you might expect, this prompted an immediate reaction from Linux greybeards. A bug report was filed just a few days ago demanding that the change be reverted, arguing that breaking a decades-old expectation with no warning could be confusing for users. The official response from a Canonical dev was that they see it the other way around, and that the change was made to improve the user experience. It was also pointed out that those who want to revert to the old style of prompt can do so with a config change. The issue was immediately marked as “Won’t Fix”, but the discussion is ongoing.

Speaking of unexpected changes, multiple reports are coming in that the February security update for Samsung Galaxy devices, which is currently rolling out, removes several functions from the Android recovery menu. After the update is applied to phones such as the S25 and Fold 7, long-standing features, such as the ability to wipe the device’s cache partition or install updates via Android Debug Bridge (ADB), disappear.

Just like with the change to sudo, this is the sort of thing that will aggravate veteran users the most. There’s been no official explanation for these changes, and it’s not immediately obvious why Samsung would fiddle with the recovery menu that’s remain largely unchanged since Android’s introduction. As 9to5Google mentions, it could be an attempt to prevent users from installing leaked firmware builds — a practice that’s gotten the attention of the electronic giant’s legal department.

These days, software updates are just one of the things you need to keep track of. Add in emails, RSS feeds, and incoming chat messages, and keeping up with the notifications on your computer or smartphone can be a challenge. But that’s nothing compared to the 800,000 alerts fired off earlier this week by the Vera Rubin Observatory. The observatory uses a 3.2 gigapixel camera to take long exposure images of the night sky, which are then compared with earlier shots to detect visual changes. Astronomers create filters to narrow down what they’re after, and can be notified when the automated system detects a match. A preview image is available in just seconds, while the full-resolution imagery takes around 80 hours to process. It’s still early days, but once the VRO gets up to speed, it’s expected that as many as seven million alerts will be generated each night.

While on the subject of large-scale engineering projects, this week, Google announced that its new data center in Minnesota will be hooked up to the world’s largest battery. The 300 megawatt array built by Form Energy will use iron-air technology, which essentially uses a reversible rusting process to store energy produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar. When those sources aren’t available, the data center can run off of battery power for up to 100 hours.

While heavier and less efficient than lithium-ion, iron-air batteries have the advantage of being substantially cheaper to produce. So while it’s unlikely you’ll see the technology in smartphones anytime soon, it’s perfect for static installations like this.

Finally, some sad news from the world of retro computing/games: a very rare copy of Tsukihime Trial Edition was apparently destroyed while in transit from one collector to another. It might not look like much — the game was distributed by the indie developers on unbranded floppies at a Japanese convention in 1999 — but it represents one of only 50 copies known to exist. While the occasional damaged package is all but unavoidable, this one is particularly egregious as it appears that someone at US Customs intentionally ripped the disk to pieces. The purchaser has filed a complaint with Customs, and we’re interested in hearing what their version of the story sounds like.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.