The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on October 19th, 2010 by tasha
The field of elder care technology for the home is booming. With so many options, the choices can be overwhelming! Laurie Orlov, magnificent Age in Place Technology blogger, recently gave a webinar that presented the best overview I’ve seen in a long time. I found Laurie’s framework to have a very clean simplicity to it that has the ring of real utility. For even as the technologies evolve, her paradigm can help you categorize and keep all the devices and services mentally in context.
She presented 2 main categories with two subsets each:
1. What seniors want
2. What seniors need
Communication and engagement include the familiar cast of characters for connecting with others:
Learning and contributing technologies focus on the need to find meaning and purpose in life. Technology facilitators include:
Safety and security devices attend to the prevention of injury or crime:
Health and wellness technologies include
In 2008, the AARP Foundation conducted a “Healthy@Home” study that offers intriguing insights. There is, for instance a discrepancy between seniors’ awareness of technologies and their willingness to use them. For many aging-in-place devices and services, awareness that they even exist is low, but reported willingness to adopt, once they learn more, is high. For some, however, the opposite is true. With Personal Emergency Response Systems, 91% reported awareness, while only 60% reported willingness to use. According to Laurie, the pattern seems to be that adult children buy the services and devices. Seniors are often not willing to spend the money and don’t see the need. But they will accede, often in response to alleviating the worry of their kids.
For in the end, it’s all about relationships. Laurie contends, and I agree, that the main benefit of technology lies in its ability to facilitate communication, which boils down to its ability to facilitate relationships. Technology, in and of itself, is just toys and gadgets. The real draw, and what will motivate seniors to use it, is the degree to which it conveniently extends social networks without a lot of cost, need for new skills, or invasion of privacy.
If you would like a copy of Laurie’s presentation, email me at tasha@elderpagesonline.com. She included many more examples than I could cover here and has given us permission to pass the presentation along. I also highly recommend that you subscribe to her blog. She does a great job of monitoring the industry without getting too geeky in her posts.
