Last year's list of tech gifts that keep on giving is still pretty accurate in terms of categories -- eReaders and eBooks, video communication devices, game-related and music-related. But be thankful, tech time marches on, and there are more variants of each, plus some new items to consider -- if you're in aging services or senior housing, pass some ideas along to residents or clients:
To type or not to type – that is the tablet question. A long time ago in a cubicle far, far away, one fingered poking at keys sent a clear message – this person can’t touch type. Must have missed the high school typing class in favor of shop. I knew many one-fingered programmers, back in the day – they advanced to management quickly to avoid exposure as the typing frauds they were. They weren’t big on writing longhand letters, and voluminous e-mails were not strengths. But authors, journalists and now bloggers (all 156 million of them) know that their strength is in paragraphs with punch AND punctuation, clauses, and…even upper-lower case. But with tablets and smart phones, the era of richness in typed text may be near an end – watch the swiping users to know of what I speak.
How not to deal with leads. I left my business card at an aging services event recently – and someone at the company was assigned to do something with it. Their approach, contact me through a robo-call to enroll me in their message broadcasting service that was not appropriate for my type of business. The authoritative recorded voice threaded its way through a description and finally spelled out the menu choices – if you want to hear more (about this lengthily described offering), press 4. But I didn’t want to hear more, so I waited for more choices, pressed another option and was led to another option, and finally got a recorded voice of a specific person (this was during business hours) for me to leave a message with information that would enable my number to be removed.
Research projects as products-to-be. Remember the iShoe? A hopeful research project, led by Erez Lieberman at MIT who won a prize in 2008 for designing it. It was to be tested by Ohio Health, to be available as a product in 2010 for $100. Someone asked me about it recently – sadly, there is no iShoe for you to buy. Maybe Ohio Health had some difficulty emerge during testing. Of course, there is also no article announcing the end of the iShoe project and concept. People remember it, though, and they confuse it with the now-available GPS shoe.
Veterans Day is a reminder of a well-recorded past. Watch aging veterans assemble in parks, read about Honor Flight – where veterans aged 83 to 100 are flown from across the country to Washington to visit the World War II and other memorials. Veterans Day is a moment in which the history and backgrounds of individuals are celebrated, speeches are given, flags are waved. Sit next to veterans at one of these events and they will proudly tell you about the remembered past. I wonder how many of them, though, have actually left a recorded (or video) version of that remembered past for family members?
Should video monitoring be required in small assisted living homes? In recent Senate testimony, ALFA president Rick Grimes sounded a bit defensive about the regulatory oversight of assisted living facilities (ALFs) in Florida (aka 'group homes' in other states). Let's back up: Even when multiple residents died of abuse and neglect and inspections revealed multiple violations, the Agency for Health Care Administration didn’t close these troubled small homes down. Says Mr. Grimes: regulation in all fifty states (aka 50 different sets of regulations) is plenty adequate, and by the way, each state’s seniors are ‘different’ -- the Florida deaths were due to ‘management’ issues.
It’s a few months before CES 2012 and a flurry of new product announcements will soon flutter out leading up to and including the Silvers Summit and Digital Health events in Las Vegas. Ahead of those to-be-determined announcements, other companies (and one core technology) have announced offerings worth noting that can help seniors and/or caregivers of seniors and deserve a heads-up to learn more via the links below. Information here is quoted from the press or vendor announcement:
AT&T -- the senior wireless provider for apps and devices for an aging population? Were you surprised to read the Forbes article about AT&T's non-phone wireless network, the largest with 14 million connected devices? Probably not, but then maybe you thought it was interesting that their Emerging Devices division (cool!) is marketing several devices that could be more than useful for boomers, caregivers, and seniors. These include a small Garmin GPS locator, and -- Blue Libris (wearable health monitor), reminding me of Halo Monitoring's MyHalo chest strap. But then AT&T's Glenn Lurie said: "The company also sees a market with senior citizens, particularly those who opt to remain in their homes instead of moving to assisted living facilities. Someone needs to keep an eye, even if only remotely, on these senior citizens and clothing is likely the easiest way for an older person to wear a physiological monitor. AT&T also plans to sell monitors that come in watch form, for example, but a senior citizen with arthritis or mobility issues may find strapping on a watch difficult." Meanwhile, back over at Verizon, they still have Family Locator (yay!) but seem to be missing the Pill Phone (still available as an app on the iPhone).
It’s that time creeping up. Once Halloween is over, we will be entering that long and wearing period known as ‘the Holidays’ – in which everyone who lives anywhere remembers that they don’t live somewhere where the relatives are. For some, that means crowding into cars, roadways, and airports. It may be another one of those mind-boggling flights filled with the frail, like the 22-wheelchair Jet Blue flight I took once from – where else – Florida to Boston, frail people struggling to board early onto planes so they can join their families for the annual hoo-ha. And if they don’t or they can’t, they are sad, as much from the media hype as anything else. So their assisted living and nursing home aides hustle and bustle, or their home care worker and anyone who helps them locally tries to do something a bit festive.
AAHSA/Leading Age -- change is incremental. As it turns out, not a big deal, skipping a year of conferences in my quest to find innovation in the use of technology for the benefit of residents among the senior housing sector. I didn’t see too much new (exceptions below). The former American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA, now optimistically renamed Leading Age), is a 5400-member organization of senior executives from the faith-based and non-profit senior housing sector, spanning most of the nursing home/rehabilitation facilities in the US – typically campus-based CCRCs. This year is the 50th anniversary of AAHSA/Leading Age, and they celebrated by including international organizations from as far away as Australia.
