healthcare

It’s a given -- Voice First will be even more pervasive in 2020. The rapid growth of the market for voice-enabled technologies has been a phenomenon within the past two years that can understand spoken requests and commands, answer questions, and even offer scheduled alerts.  Industry firms like Gartner expect that the combination of natural language processing, AI, and speech recognition are driving significant growth in adoption of voice technology across multiple dimensions. Speech recognition, for example, will penetrate 80% of mobile devices by 2020.   Some describe this trend of developing software for voice-enabled device user interfaces as Voice First.

Pew’s latest examined screen time for older adults.  The highlight of this document published in June – from age 60 to 80 and beyond, older adults spend more time on their screens (watching TV or videos) than on anything else other than sleep. And that includes time spent working. And one other interesting tidbit – 40% of those in their 60s are still working, which of course includes the un-retired. But 14% of people in their 70s are still working, according to Pew, along with 4% of people in their 80s. The report also notes that 73% of the 65+ are Internet users, and 53% are smartphone users.  As with the younger population, reading and socializing time has ticked down.

In 2017, it was clear that virtual reality technology had evolved beyond the point of experiments and was having a number of limited introductions into the world of older adults, including senior living environments (Rendever) as well as pain mitigation (FirstHand). Virtual reality has made its way into the 'future of healthcare delivery' consulting, as firms like Care Innovations and Deloitte publish their how-to white papers.  For 2019, here are five VR offerings that specifically note benefits for older adults. The content is drawn from the firms’ websites and/or articles about them:

HIMSS 2019 is where 43,000 health IT enthusiasts engage.    Per their own by-the-numbers charts, you see a picture of the scale of it -- more than 40,000 attendees wanted to be in Orlando, braving weather-related travel obstacles, obtain any required continuing education units – and ideally see as much as possible of the 1300 vendor exhibits. Remembering that adults 65+ are major consumers of healthcare. Here are five of these offerings from 2019 HIMSS, viewed with the lens of caregiving and older adults. 

Held each year – but has much changed? The Connected Health Conference is still a Health IT conference, owned by HIMSS, spruced up by the pre-conference Voice Health summit, task forces, and even onstage singing by health tech folk that may wish they were in show business. There were more sessions acknowledging caregiving and even acknowledging aging adults -- as well as gnashing of teeth about non-adoption of technology in healthcare.