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The growing ecosystem of devices and products serving peoples’ health and well-being shows us that innovators already see the opportunity to serve the fast-growing market for self-care among people 50 years of age and up. 

01/08/2026

For nearly twenty years, one thing has felt inevitable: when boomers reach “old age,” senior living demand will surge. And yet ..

01/08/2026

ChatGPT Health builds on consumer use of today's ChatGPT so responses are informed by your health information and context. 

01/08/2026

The prize honors .lumen’s Glasses for the Blind, an AI-based device that applies autonomous driving technology adapted for pedestrians. Using computer vision and local processing, the headset understands the three-dimensional environment in real time without relying on the internet or pre-defined maps and guides the user through subtle vibrations indicating a safe direction to follow.

01/03/2026

The United States faces a fundamental mismatch between surging demand and insufficient capacity.

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February 2012

Mobile devices and data everywhere, not a drop of information to drink

The mobile device projections are in – and they’re big, REALLY big.  This may just be bigger than the recent and trendy thoughts on the Internet of Things (which was observed by Forrester 11 years ago), and reminds one that it is tough to keep a good phrase down.  So let’s look at three mobile device examples, in descending order of the date predictions they specify, and as described in news articles:

The future of aging and tech via the lens of today's seniors

Surveys drive assumptions, not always correct.  Let’s imagine a world in which a survey organization deliberately sampled technology use beginning with adults aged 65 and peaking at age 100. Yeah, right. The most frequent sampler, Nielsen Wire, begins at 18 and winds down at “65+.” And they are not alone. From these and other surveys, we are often led to believe that a thirty year range of seniors buy and behave exactly the same. Now consider how silly we’d find studies that lumped 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds into the same behavioral buying bucket.

Transcending tech’s targets to craft senior applications

Let’s push the limits of intended tech markets. Pondering the pundits on the latest iThis and the newest fitThat, let’s turn the viewing lens to how the cool and the new could be re-purposed or extended to help seniors. No change needs to be made to hardware, typically, just a tweak here to existing apps – or a new app, that would do the job – feel free to go forth and to market with:

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Ah, Google: the software is free – you, not so much

We are so lucky in the ‘cloud’ – vendors upgrade, with or without us. It must have been a thorn in the side of Google engineering that they had separate privacy policies for each of their products. And they were probably plagued by inconsistent contact handling between Gmail, Gmail chat, Google+, and their boatload of acquired companies (like Youtube, DoubleClick, Feedburner, etc.) As they simplify their own maintenance workload beginning on March 1, this streamlining could be an interesting challenge for users.  Many ‘features’ and new defaults may startle -- and not in a positive way.

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