Doing Well by Doing Good: How developing technology to empower the Elderly will save them, us–and your business
At 88, my aunt is blessed with the blood pressure of someone half her age, lives independently — albeit close to a loving and capable daughter — and attends a senior center regularly. Yet she’s restless. “I am a burden,” she tells me on a recent visit. “I have nothing to do, no one to see.”
I understand. To someone social and active, being alone and idle is hell. At this stage of life, she had envisioned herself imparting wisdom and family lore, in person, to younger generations — not linking to her family via a phone. Despite owning a smartphone, she doesn’t use the internet to interact with family, be entertained, or know more. And she’s far from alone in that. While close to two-thirds of people aged 65 and older have smartphones, only a fraction of them use those phones on a regular basis for anything other than making phone calls or sending an occasional text. Those who do, overwhelmingly use it to connect to social media. The situation is worse for the less privileged. While nine out of ten seniors with a college degree and/or household income of $75,000 or more, use the internet regularly, only four out of ten of those who have not attended college and. or make less than $30,000 annually, do so.
It’s not that my aunt — or other seniors, for that matter — are ignorant of the wealth of resources available on the web. They just have a hard time interacting with the ever more complex applications some of us use routinely, such as Zoom or online classes. To begin with, typing on a touch screen is challenging if you have arthritic fingers, or reading off a small screen if your eyesight is failing. MIT Age Lab has a setup that requires users to wear gloves that limit their movement to mimic arthritic hands, a headset that distorts sound, and glasses that depict what an aging eye sees. Using the setup is eye-opening.
Speech recognition engines such as Siri or Alexa are not of much help, either. The pattern of speech changes as we age, increasing the machine’s error rate by many folds. That makes the use of the speech interface frustrating. And for many foreign-born seniors, having an accent just multiplies the problem.
Even for people who can interact with phones easily, initiating and using new applications can be challenging. I experienced this problem first-hand during the Covid lockdown when I tried to arrange Zoom meetings with my older relatives. My aunt, who is not ignorant of technology — she drove her own car and skied in 1950s Iran–still needs someone else to set up Zoom sessions for her, or help her navigate streaming media.
Finally, most seniors are apprehensive about the lack of security online and the preponderance of scams targeting them. The combination makes them feel inadequate. Many loathe asking for continuous support,
The future is not promising. Established companies and startups alike rush to introduce new feature-rich devices and applications for the young, leaving the senior set behind. As an example, smartphones increasingly have functions that require the use of multiple fingers simultaneously — i.e., holding one button while pressing another. Using these features is all but impossible for an older person.
The long-term picture is no better: of the $300B VCs invested in technology-based startups in 2021, only $2B went to ventures targeting elder care, most of them to manage severe conditions like Parkinson’s. Without proper investments in products targeting healthy older adults, hoping for improvements is futile.
Why should we care?
The outpouring of grief after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II reminded us that we need our elders. They link us to the past and provide us with continuity to our roots. They show us how to be resilient. But just parking them in a senior home is not enough for them, or for us. For them, isolation and helplessness lead to depression and ultimately suicide. The rate of suicide among the elderly is alarming. Even before Covid, in 2020, 18% of the nearly 46,000 people who ended their own lives in the US were aged 65 and older — that’s a total of 9,137 people. And that figure doesn’t include silent suicides, i.e., deaths by overdose, self-starvation, dehydration, and “accidents.”
And for younger people, not interacting with elders robs them of a vital link to the past. With families spread out and lives busy, web-based platforms could link us all, young and old — but only if everyone can use them easily.
What can be done?
Providing technical support is not ideal as it is not permanent and often leaves the elderly with a sense of inadequacy in dealing with technology. But it can be a short-term solution for seniors — especially those who are underprivileged or living with disabilities — to access the web. Volunteer organizations such as Senior Planet recruit and train the elderly to support other seniors, which helps with increasing self-sufficiency.
But the real solution is to rethink innovation in the user interface. “Enhancing user experience” is already a buzzword. For the elderly–and less technically native–it means paring down and simplifying access–and not the functionality as some dumbed-down phones do, rather than adding more features. This is particularly important for linking people with various degrees of technical proficiency. These innovations will also bring financial rewards. Healthy elderly people, able to pay for products and services, are one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. They can support innovative products just as a looming recession shrinks the young people’s budget. VCs: take note!
