Television/Smart TV

Some have said the concept of ‘AgeTech’ can be a bit depressing.  It is especially bleak when you look at the startup portfolio which aggregates a variety of tech categories to help older adults in their later years, Making Aging Easier for Everyone, and includes offerings that tackle deficits like issues with mobility, fall detection/prevention, caregiving, Alzheimer’s, vision, and many aspects of health. AgeTech tools include a few for the heavily-invested category of Digital Health ($3 Billion in Q1 2025).  All these products, all very useful, fill gaps in the general consumer market.  Consumer product designers tend not to start the day thinking about the older adult as a market segment. Instead, older adults are segmented into their roles -- older adults are the care recipients (B2B healthcare and senior living), as well as individuals with disabilities and needs for greater accessibility and/or services.  All useful.

An increasingly tech-oriented society makes older adult tech adoption critical. While many information-based offerings are now AI-enabled, many other capabilities like wearables and sensors, can offer safety features or be enablers for those with physical challenges -- including mobility and hearing. In addition, for those who are most comfortable interacting with a smart TV, there are new solutions that make the TV a more effective device, improve walking, or enable greater safety when out and about.  Here are five first-time entrants in this year’s report that fit that category – all content directly from the companies:

Each of several recent years, AARP has surveyed older adults about tech use. This year’s report is remarkable – they created a new online survey segment, the 80+ age range.  Responses were not too surprising. There was skepticism about whether tech can enable a healthy life – the percentage dropping among those aged 70+ since last year. Perhaps they know that a healthy life also depends on diet and exercise – and that 40% of Americans 65+ are obese. Remember that only 23% of adults aged 65+ exercise in accordance with federal guidelines.  Those guidelines include 2 days per week of strength training, which helps retain muscle mass, improve balance and reduce risk from falls.  

An old report, the core concept of Connected Living was excellent and predictive.  Thirteen years ago, AARP sponsored research that posed questions about technology’s future role in connecting older adults with families, resources and each other. With input from 30 industry experts, the research attempted to determine how technology could better serve older adults moving forward. The result was a 2011 report called Connected Living for Social Aging: Designing Technology for All. You won’t find it on AARP’s website – it’s too old.  But it is very interesting, especially given that year's low technology adoption and extremely limited use among older adults compared to today. The report accurately predicted the major role technology would take in their lives as they aged, though experts were not exactly sure how.

The decline of our tech experience was slow – it was barely noticeable for a while. Then device proliferation in homes – and the corresponding frustration became too obvious to miss. An AARP report notes, "No one prefers badly designed, over-complicated products." Yet that's what we get. Despite preferences, surveys show that today’s user experience for older adults is more problematic than ever. All are confronted with buggy software and frequent bug fix releases, such as a problem on iPhones that an embarrassed Apple redirected software work towards fixing. At the same time, innovation in new categories like Conversational and GenAI, machine learning and prediction have emerged and can help improve experiences if deployed properly. Over the next five years, it is highly likely that:

The mindset of ‘get the product out the door’ sets the stage for poor user experience. For market researchers, there are many data-driven ways to gauge consumer preferences today, and tech companies can chose among surveys, interviews, focus groups and customer observation. Product life cycles in newer tech categories are shrinking, with consumers willing to replace devices that still work with newer models, hence the apparent ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ tech cycle. In the future, we will need a new paradigm for tech user experience that can span our multiple interactions, driven by an opt-in profile about preferences and personal characteristics that can better shape interactions.  We will expect that our profile will drive technology access. Today’s fragmented tech experience offers behaviors based on a disconnected set of profiles – a Starbucks profile knows what coffee I like, a Gmail profile knows about my Inbox preferences, and Marriott knows what kind of room or bed is preferred. In the future and with the assistance of conversational AI, the user should be able to override those and specify a profile that spans all tech interactions, acting as a complexity-hiding agent on the user’s behalf.  

What happens when engineers believe that no matter what, the customers will buy? Rant on. Look at the forum discussions of problems after Apple’s release in November, or consider Google’s Gemini self-humiliation.  Will users turn in their iPhones in disgust? Stop using Gmail in protest? What about the Tesla that is so cool it does not have to identify clearly how to open the door, or put the car into drive or reverse? Was the car returned? Will customers return a device they don’t understand? Consider Windows 11 updates are tormenting users, again per Microsoft’s own forum. Will people give up using the PC? Not likely. 

The decline of design.  As interviews proceed for the upcoming report, The Future of the Tech User Experience, all agree.  The deteriorating user experience, aka UX, is the result of fragmentation across multiple devices, portals, and websites. Product development has superseded UX. The pre-development focus group has been largely abandoned in favor of a post release shock-and-awe experience both for developers (bad PR) and customers (just plain bad).  And it is not just tech – consider the impenetrable smart TV interface, the microwave button-display combination, the new car that lacks readable warning lights and other user interface issues.  Here are the blog posts from March:

User experience non-design – it’s not just tech devices – consider the stove’s cockpit.’  Studying the screen plus button choices on a new Microwave, one wonders who tested this interface?  Did they really think that the combinations were self-explanatory and intuitive?   Or is the convention of poor design so inherent in microwave, oven, and washing machine interfaces, that a ‘cockpit’ design is expected (both by the vendor and the user).   Of course, a cockpit is an appropriate term – imagine a pilot sitting down in the left seat of an airplane with zero training on what to touch first.

The 2024 survey is out – some might say it is positive about tech adoption.  Older adults (age 50+) own nearly every tech owned by those age 18-49. They have smartphones, tablets, Smart TVs, wearables – with the same disinterest in smart home technologies. The cynical among us might say that some tech change (like the 3G to 5G cutover) forced smartphone adoption.  And so the growth in smartphone ownership is led by older adults And it’s pretty tough to buy a ‘dumb TV’ these days even if you wanted one, though it’s feasible.