Demographic change and continuously increasing spending on public health have intensified the public debate as well as deliberations on the development and deployment of new assistive technologies for health, independent living, and well-being for senior citizens. Other than large-scale, policy-driven health initiatives that envision ambitious and risky “grand designs”, in this paper we illustrate the case of a grassroots- like project which used Action Design Research (ADR) as guiding research paradigm to produce a low-cost, yet effective, monitoring system for people with mild cognitive impairments or dementia. Besides a description of meta-requirements and solution components, we also identify general implications for future research. In particular, we explain how an ADR- inspired approach to social innovation could be a useful alternative to large-scale, policy-driven health initiatives to increase the time-to-market of new solutions, pre-test new use cases, and to enhance accessibility and affordability of assistive technologies for the local community.