New collaboration provides a rich, digital connection between family members and their senior loved ones without requiring them to use a computer or have Internet service.
Shoreview, MN and Los Altos, CA (PRWEB) May 17, 2011
Are older adults living offline lives – now? It’s so tough predicting the distant future when the pace of adoption accelerates. The Boston Globe ‘Ideas’ column on the Future of Old interviewed a plethora of pundits on just how social our online lives might be, so different and remarkable when today’s 30-year-olds turn 70 in 2050. Think how much of a contrast that video game playing, cat video viewing generation would be to today’s old folk – struggling with isolation, boredom and Alzheimer’s (43% of people over the age of 85 show symptoms, cites writer Leon Neifakh.)
Aging in a capital P Place. The 90-year-old Motion Picture Television Fund campus in Woodland Hills is (total understatement here!) not your typical continuing care retirement community. It was developed for those who have worked in the industry at least 20 years, whether they were secretaries, set designers, cameramen, actors, directors, producers -- or the surviving spouses of same. The tour tends to stun even jabbermouths like me into silence after seeing the Roddy McDowell Rose Garden with the statue of Roddy McDowell in his role in the Planet of the Apes, after looking at the beautifully designed cottages and villas, seeing the on-campus movie theatre, then the in-house television station, the tiny John Ford chapel, the warm arthritis pool, watching the water aerobics class, peeking at the community gym and sitting for a few minutes with a charming resident and former film director whose wall was covered with signed photos from movie stars and a mind filled with memories from a long Hollywood career.