Tech firms giveth to innovation for seniors – and taketh away

Sometimes the biggest firms lose interest in older adults almost immediately.  Rant on.That was Amazon 50+. And some, like Apple, never get started, despite interest from their supporters or an integrator like IBM.  Others might get started thinking about a good idea – but within a year or so, executives hold a meeting and one of them says – 'What? What? When did we start to focus on older adults?' How is that a growth proposition, especially for the oldest old?  And so the companies get started, move a bit and/or cancel the effort altogether. Or like Google, they focus on the really far-end of the aging continuum – solving death.

• Microsoft Kinect – now that was a pretty good idea.  Competing with the well-established and senior favorite Wii game console, Microsoft sold 29 million units, created an SDK for partner companies to do interesting things with it – but the company has given up on active marketing of it, including developers who at one point were considering all sort of alternative uses. Today, the big Kinect non-excitement is the ability to log into Windows 10 with your face – how useful. Geeks still discuss the Kinect offering – but virtually no firm other than Reflexion Health uses it for what it seemed ideal for, that is, directed exercise.  

• Amazon 50+ Active and Healthy Living Store.  This announcement arrived in January 2014, leading with defibrillators and incontinence supplies. Then this site evaporated pretty so quickly you might not have noticed, though the news was posted on many websites.  Likely enough, Amazon was a bit taken aback, one imagines, by consumer and uh, critical dismay. Incontinence supplies are tagged first under Health, Household and Baby supplies (of course!) and defibrillators under First Aid: Health and Household.  

• Tech and loneliness among older adults – what about Yahoo! or Microsoft?  Would this market be considered by one-time portal vendors -- like Yahoo! -- perhaps? Perhaps not. At one point in the distant past, Microsoft had employees assigned to the task of helping older adults conquer technology – they published a guide which has now been reduced to a web page. But Microsoft also had a Virtual Senior Center. Now that is the purview of SelfHelp in NYC – the Microsoft role is silent. On Microsoft’s own pages, the remaining online material is about Assistive Technology and the references are to other sites like Boundless Assistive Technology or EnableMart – which then dead-ends when the topic is not about school-age children.

• Verizon and AT&T weigh in on the search for senior cell phones.  Periodically Verizon expresses interest -- and then not so much, until regulatory change mandates something, no doubt in exchange for something else. This must be the not-so-much period, since at least one of those linked phones is no longer in the market. But plenty of regulatory changes lie ahead, not the least of which includes elimination of land lines in some states. In March of this year, the FCC put out a rewrite of its low-income Lifeline phone requirements to eventually include mobile broadband.  And Verizon offers an age 65+ set of plans which can get pretty pricey; AT&T offers Senior Nation plans.  Would Verizon care about seniors if not pressured by the government? Unlikely -- given their track record of landline repair. That contrasts with their $6 billion interest in health. Health tech may include seniors by happenstance, but to generate the big bucks, it cannot be ABOUT them. Wait, does that make sense when the oldest adults consume the greatest portion of government health dollars? Rant off.