Law 7/2026 of 25 February approved Portugal's Statute for Older Persons. It created no new social response and no new funding: it gathered scattered rights into a single instrument and applied them expressly to non-profits and to every establishment, public or private, that houses and cares for older people (article 2(3)).
For a care home's technical director the useful question is not «what is the Statute». It is what changes on Monday morning. This article answers that for the part we work in — activities — and also says where technology has no business being.
This is a technology supplier's reading of the law, not legal advice. The full text was published in Diário da República, 1st series, no. 39, of 25 February 2026.
The four articles that touch the activity plan
Article 6(b) — autonomy. Older people have the right to autonomy, being free to take decisions about their own life, including where they wish to live, the care they wish to receive, and their involvement in social, political and cultural activities.
Read that last part slowly: taking part in an activity is the person's decision. Not a good-practice suggestion, not a line in a quality manual. A right, in an act of parliament.
Article 18 — cultural and leisure activities. A single sentence: older people have the right to take part in cultural, sporting and leisure activities. The right is to take part, and article 6 says the decision to take part is theirs.
Article 3(3)(c) lists among the underpinnings of these rights the primacy of alternative forms of participation, occupation and interaction with other generations. Bingo and television is not what the legislator had in mind.
Article 8(2) names, in point (b), services combining medical and nursing care, psychology, physiotherapy and «cognitive, sensory and motor stimulation», and in point (f) instructs that responses be reinforced with technological tools that improve their efficiency.
As far as we can tell, it is the first time cognitive and sensory stimulation is named in an instrument of this kind — alongside medicine, nursing, psychology and physiotherapy, not as decoration.
What it changes in practice
1. The activity plan can no longer be only collective
If the decision to take part is individual, a plan made only of scheduled group activities answers article 6 badly for anyone who will not, cannot or is unable to be in the group. In a care home that is a lot of people: the bedbound resident, the one with aphasia, the one who becomes agitated late in the day, the one who never liked singing along.
The honest reading is this: the Statute does not require you to buy anything. It requires you to have an answer for whoever falls outside what already exists. We wrote about building that plan in activity plans for care homes.
2. A resident's «no» now has legal standing
Refusing an activity has always been a moral right. Now it is a written one. What that mostly changes is recording: a refusal that is never written down becomes, two months later, a «he never wanted to join in» that nobody can date or justify.
Our own rule predates the law and is set out in what to do when someone refuses: the session ends when the person wants it to, with no persuasion, and the refusal is recorded like any other event.
3. Consent moves up a level
Article 10 covers information and decisions about health care, revocable at any time. For a non-clinical wellbeing activity that is not a heavy process — but it is why consent for people using our equipment is described in informed consent, including the case where someone cannot consent unaided.
4. Going outside remains irreplaceable
Here we have to be clear against our own commercial interest. Article 3 speaks of interaction with other generations, and article 22 of mobility and the removal of barriers. No technology inside a building delivers that.
A walk, a visit, a child in the room: there is no digital equivalent. When a care home uses equipment to stop doing the outings it used to do, the result is worse than before it bought anything — and runs against the spirit of the law. Our place is in what is left over: the days when going out is impossible, and the people who can no longer go out at all.
What the law does not say
The Statute does not mention virtual reality, nor should it. It creates no duty to acquire equipment, sets no activity ratios, fixes no deadlines and carries no funding. Anyone telling you «the new law requires X» is selling X.
What the law does is shift the burden: you now have to explain why a given resident has no participation offer — rather than simply pointing at an activity plan pinned to the wall.
A short list for the next team meeting
Four questions you can answer without buying anything:
- Of your current residents, how many took part in at least one activity last week? And how many took part in none?
- For those, is the reason written down — refusal, clinical condition, or simply nothing on offer that fitted?
- Are refusals recorded, with a date and who was present?
- What exists today for someone who does not leave their room?
If the answer to the fourth is «not much», there is a problem there that predates any supplier's catalogue, ours included. And if technology then helps, it helps because it is useful to specific people, not because it is new.
The RVer platform's base product is a Class I medical device registered with Infarmed. Sessions are run by the institution's own professionals, complement existing care and do not replace clinical follow-up.