computers, broadband, and social networking

Tech vendors and seniors – purposeful advocates? Maybe you saw this the other day – how Microsoft and several organizations along with the City of Los Angeles are partnering to launch "Exergamers Wellness Club, which combines technology with exercise, overall health monitoring and evidence-based health education from Partners in Care built around the Kinect and Xbox 360 technology – a program that involves dance, Tai Chi, and other fitness activities. Such a hit, it is being expanded to all senior centers in the city." Note that the announcement actually included Microsoft’s role – both with donation of Kinect and Xbox, but also the use of HealthVault and a personal health application for participating seniors. In fact, Microsoft has, one way or the other, been a named participant in activities for seniors for a number of years, back to the well-intentioned SeniorPC launched in 2007 – the offering was still updated on HP’s site as of last year. 

Overcoming tech inertia in senior housing.  Andrew Carle, founder of George Mason University’s senior housing administrator program, was interviewed by Senior Housing News on the labor-saving benefits of technology use. That he felt compelled to suggest that technology was both an opportunity and a threat was interesting. But is the low penetration of a variety of technologies more about inertia on the part of management and lack of insistence by families who are fearful of making waves? Residents and families would be able to participate in a richer living experience if senior housing organizations overcame their inertia and offered:

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.

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.