So internet use is up -- for almost everyone. The latest survey from Pew is out -- and Internet use among the 65+ age segment is up -- more than half of those surveyed say they are online. But that would be the age band from 65 to 75 -- sometimes referred to as the 'young old'. After 75, only 34% are online, and only one in five have home broadband. (As you must know by now, even reading this blog would be an endurance test at dial-up speeds -- and it has no graphics!) For the two-thirds of those aged 76 and beyond that are not online yet -- it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Non-users in previous surveys said that to use the Internet would require training and help to go online. Yet non-users also indicated lack of relevance as a reason not to bother. But if they don't have the training to make it happen, it seems tough to determine if the content found there is relevant or not. Could be anything ranging from a WebMD symptom checker to discounts to health information from NCOA to free online courses offered by MIT. To me, that implies that action is required -- and it is more than the initiative by AARP and the Geek Squad.
Reaching the end of my boomer ‘ain’t we cool’ rope. Rant on. Got one of those ’10 baby boomers inventions that rocked our world’ e-mails today from a party who will remain nameless, but wanted to be credited should I publish it. It felt familiar. Why, it was remarkably similar to a 2010 Reuters reprint of an article: Baby boomer inventions that changed the world which itself was an excerpt from a book by Patrick Kiger. No clue how many articles pre-date that one that noted the Jarvik heart, WWW, the Apple II, DNA, blah, blah, blah. The self-aggrandizement (and marketing promotional opportunity) of boomers and those who wish to make a buck off of them – it's enough to make one gag. And, as they say, I ARE one, and yeah, my business supposedly targets that demographic.
Rounding up from a series of press releases, encounters and other notifications accumulated over the past few months, from the very small firm to the very large, from the very new to the very new release, here are some new technologies and/or services that may be new to you, for use by or in support of older adults. All material is from the vendor published information:
Facebook friends are fine, but devices rule. Yesterday’s Facebook hullabaloo should be placed in a larger context – not only do they not make a physical product, but your Friends beam at you through a gazillion different and ever-more-mobile devices. Forget Facebook for a second, because it might be just today’s pet rock front end. Let’s mull over those gazillion different devices. Just who will support you, regardless of your age and how tech smart you think you are, as they multiply in your environment like weeds? Who helps you with making these devices work properly with other tablets, computers, and cloud and installed software? The Genius at the bar is a bit vendor-specific, don’t you think? And the IT folks that you know are busy battling enterprise-wide viruses, and there you are at home and on the phone, with your relatives of all ages as they peer helplessly at glowing screens, plaintively intoning that old refrain, “But it worked yesterday!”
Perhaps we need a new set of work and life expectations. Doesn't it strike you as interesting that the so-called 'retirement' age (that is when you can receive full Social Security benefits) has been 65 for a long time? It has bumped up just recently -- but then so has average life expectancy. According to data compiled by the Social Security Administration: "A man reaching age 65 today can expect to live, on average, until age 83. A woman turning age 65 today can expect to live, on average, until age 85. And those are just averages. About one out of every four 65-year-olds today will live past age 90, and one out of 10 will live past age 95." The oldest age that SSA considers for initial full eligibility is 67 -- for those born in 1960 or later. Meanwhile, the average anticipated retirement age in the US is, what a surprise, age 67.
Biting the hand that reads you. Your inbox, I bet, is filled with stuff you don’t want, some of which gets trapped into your spam filters and can be made to disappear with a poof. But what if the sender’s software thinks it is smarter than you are at knowing what that is? Lately this has happened more than once and I think it is a bit creepy. Today’s example is LinkedIn, which has monitoring tools to see if you’ve opened the e-mail it has sent you. If you don’t open the e-mail often enough, LinkedIn helpfully offers you the opportunity to reduce the frequency of those digests -- summary of posts from my membership in forty LinkedIn Groups. “Would I like to switch from daily to weekly?” Ya know, if it was really that irritating, maybe I would have switched the settings myself. So I switched the setting back to daily – but LinkedIn will no doubt try to outsmart me.
The Internet haves and have-nots. Pew Research produced an intriguing summary in April, Digital Differences, a long-term comparison report of changes in Internet use between the years 2000 and 2011. In June 2000, only 12 percent of the 65+ population (aka seniors) were online – and today, 41% are. And just in time for US government agencies switchover to online requirements: the other 59% will need a backup plan. According to a new Washington lobbying group, paper versions of tax forms, savings bonds, annual social security statements and social security checks (switching to direct deposit) will soon be just a memory. So it is important to have accurate data about who has online access and who doesn't -- particularly within a vulnerable population of older adults.
The National Dinner -- heartrending and motivated. I was fortunate to attend an amazing dinner last night in Washington as a guest of Philips. This looked like, but was no ordinary awards banquet. The National Alzheimer's Dinner, the organization's largest (and most well-attended, ever) Alzheimer's Association annual fundraising event, hosted by Meredith Vieria and with a parade of famous folk. These included Jane Seymour who has made a documentary about Alzheimer's sufferer Glen Campbell, Maria Shriver who produced The Alzheimer's Project on HBO, and Pat Summitt, the famed Tennessee coach who has early onset (beginning at age 58) Alzheimer's Disease, who was there with her son. Beyond those folk (!), the evening's ceremony included heart-stopping comments from individuals who currently have a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. But then the audience stood up in groups -- first to stand were individuals who have a current diagnosis, then those with a family member diagnosed with Alzheimer's, followed by those caregiving for someone with the disease, finally those with a family member who died as a result of Alzheimer's. Emotionally drained yet?
It's another health tech day and Mayo Clinic concludes a study. So who knew? Telehealth monitoring is not effective at keeping patients out of the hospital! So reports a new study from those who (repeatedly) study these things. Does that bode ill for telehealth marketers, who fervently hope that pending re-hospitalization penalties would energize a long-lived but relatively small market. Use of telemonitoring equipment, the study concluded, should continue to be limited to studies. And oh, by the way, doctors need to 'learn how to do something with all of that data!' Yeah, no kidding. Apparently, knowing nothing about the patient's condition except for 'routine' primary care visits with doctors ($$) and specialists ($$$), we learn that with only 205 elderly patients from Minnesota, half (103? 102?) were chosen to be monitored by the now-defunct Intel Health Guide, reborn last year in a GE-Intel spinoff as the Care Innovations Guide.
Homecaretechnology use needs to be understood now.Today there are a plethora of surveys in health and aging services topics – ranging from consumer preferences about housing (MetLife), technology product use (Pew and Nielsen), and family caregiver concerns and health technology adoption (National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP). But there are no recent surveys about the use oftechnology among skilled home health providers, geriatric care management and non-skilled/companion care.
