Any year now, I’ll be turning a corner and find myself an old lady.
Oh, they say that “age is just a number.” But when that number is approaching triple digits, well, there are some inevitables that come with it. For me, there won’t necessarily be mind-slippage, at least to any great degree. My mother only lived to 81, but she didn’t miss a beat. My Aunt Mary is 93 and is still in full possession of her entire set of marbles. The longevitiest of my family members – my grandmother Rogers – made it to 97. Although she did have an occasional mental hiccup, she was mostly all there.
But not matter the level of fit as a fiddle-ness you strive for and even achieve, things fall apart. At some point, however far in the future, the center cannot hold. And I will most assuredly die. As will everyone else.
This can, of course, take decades. We live a lot longer than we used to. If you make it to 65, odds are you’ll make it to 83. And a bunch of Boston startups are focusing on products that will make those decades full of inevitable difficulties, big and small, a bit easer on us.
Pillo, a startup in Boston’s Fort Point district, has developed a robot that sits on your grandparents’ kitchen counter, greets them in the morning, and gently reminds them to take their pills.
Another early-stage local company called Eversound sells wireless headphones whose volume controls let seniors with varying levels of hearing loss exercise or watch movies together.
And a third Boston startup, Rendever, has created immersive software that can transport housebound elders to the African Serengeti and the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu, with the help of virtual reality goggles. (Source: Boston Globe)
I don’t need a robot to remind me to take my pills, thank you. At least not yet. But my hearing is not as sharp as it once was – a noticeable loss for someone nicknamed “radar ears” as a child. Not that I have anyone to watch TV with – oh, boo-hoo – but I’ll be a candidate for those headphones.
I wouldn’t mind going to the Serengeti and/or Machu Picchu without having to actually go there, but I’m a bit curious about what’s the difference between virtual reality travel goggles for old folks and those for everyone else. Do things move more slowly for us oldsters? Fewer scary bits? Machu Picchu from the ground, rather than from above? No sudden heart-stoppers?
Rendever does offer something that’s more personal for old folks:
Moving into a facility no longer means leaving everything behind. Allow residents to take a stroll down memory lane by revisiting their home, favorite park, or wedding site.
I’m thinking that these strolls down memory lane might prove a mixed bag. Looking through old pictures are one thing. Virtually walking through the rooms of you old home that you probably didn’t want to leave? Might that not make you sad? Those look backs are used for something called “reminiscence therapy”, which I guess is helpful for those with senility. Thus, I hope I never need any more “reminiscence therapy” than laughing at the pictures my cousin Ellen texts over to me, as she did the other day when she and my cousin Mary Pat were going through some old family pictures and found a couple of lulus. I loved the one of some of the Dineen kids, some of the Rogers kids, and my not-much-older-than-us Aunt Kay. We looked like the Dead End Kids,it they’d been straight out of Appalachia.
Anyway, the tech companies listed above are part of the emerging “age-tech” cluster in Massachusetts.
I believe this clustering was pretty much kicked off by the AgeLab at MIT, which has been around for nearly twenty years. Shortly after it was founded, I heard Joe Coughlin, its founder, speak. The Lab’s work – using technology to keep the elderly up and running - was fascinating then. It’s even more fascinating now, given that I’ve aged into the demographic of interest.
As of a couple of weeks ago, there’s even a “global innovation challenge” – run by a consortium of the AgeLab, GE, and state government – “seeking to generate new ideas for technology-assisted aging.” The goal: make Massachusetts the “Silicon Valley” for the greying of our society, focusing on “emerging products and services that reduce social isolation and loneliness for the older population.”
To date, a lot of the focus of the overall old-folks tech industry has been on applications like remote patient monitoring, medication monitoring, and “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” devices. These are mostly “keep you alive” apps. The Rendevers and Eversounds of the world are about “making life better” apps.
Go for it!
If I’m going to live longer, I sure want to make sure I live better.
Not everyone sees the age-tech boom as an unalloyed blessing. Alexandra Suchman, a management consultant in Washington, D.C., acknowledges some utility in the plethora of devices coming to market. But she worries that many may be too complicated for older folks to use.
And she doesn’t see them as a substitute for human contact.
“Technology overpromises,” Suchman said. “People think they can design a robot or write some code that will solve all problems. But only people can meet the emotional needs of other people.”
I’m with Suchman. I’m delighted that there’ll be all sorts of wonderful technology to help me along my merry way out. And I’m delighted that a lot of it will be made in Massachusetts. But I’m pretty sure I’m still going to want the human factor to factor in.
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