Aging and Health Technology Watch

We are headed to a Consumer-Driven Healthcare Market that is personalized and integrated, with connected healthcare lifting limits of demand and job lock, staying in a job in order to retain health insurance -- so says Regina Herzlinger, Professor, Harvard Business School and author of Who Killed Healthcare? Her predictions: First and foremost, employers will cash you out of your job-locking employer-based system into a consumer-based market, where you buy you own health insurance.

The session topic: Social Networks, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, delivered byClay Sharkey (Author, Consultant, and Professor at NYU). Clay Sharkey pointed out the fallacy of ‘trusted systems.’ Instead, he noted that information goes to where the trust is – using examples of how e-mail replaced the original purpose of the Internet -- Telnet and FTP -- within 3 months of its existence.

[Here is the first of five excerpts from notes I took at Connected Health Symposium in Boston a few weeks ago]

I love the idea of 'brain wellness'!  Don't we all want our brains to be well? Exercising them right along with our calf raises and seated arm curls.  But how? And with what? We certainly know that web surfing helps but there is an entire product range out there from game workstations and technology, but also software that is purely for improving mind health and vigor.

I just saw a checklist on caring.com for helping adult children who worried about aging parents and whether they should stay in their own homes. For those thinking about these issues, there is plenty of advice on the site that can deepen thinking and identify ways to help.

You'd think a symposium on 'connected health', a Boston conference with 1000 attendees that included investors (who warned that there was going to be a bloodbath of failed startups) as well as vendors and tech-aware doctors would be inspiring, but the actual experience was quite the opposite.

I admit it: I often forget to take my fish oil tablet, one of the several tactics my doctor recommends to drive down my bad cholesterol. It’s a fact of life; everyone forgets to take a medication dose at one time or another. But as we age, the list of medications prescribed by our doctors grows and the number of times per day we have to think about it multiplies. For a growing number of Americans, forgetting a medication dose or taking the wrong dose can threaten both health and quality of life.

I admit it.

Successful aging is not an oxymoron. First the textbook definition (from "The Realities of Aging, Kinsey/Kart): "aging in which external factors either have a neutral role or counteract the effects of internal aging processes, resulting in little or no decrements in functioning." Whew. What does that mean?

I've become a bit obsessed with searching and thinking about PC simplification products (note previous entries about Presto and Celery) that enable seniors to connect to others (family, friends, caregivers...) Maybe I got into a searching frenzy after a 79-year old family friend just confided to me last week that the e-mail appliance in her home has stopped working and she can no longer exchange e-mail with her teenage grandkids.