Aging and Health Technology Watch

Apocalypse and opportunity -- the bet is that we're not going to age well.   Our favorite gloom-and-doom source, CNBC, has offered up today's Doomsday Boomer Prediction. Those boomers are going to be a healthcare nightmare: "They visit the doctor more, they consume more services, and they aren’t afraid to use their $7 trillion in collective wealth to improve their quality of life.

CNBC wants to believe boomers represent big business. Tom Brokaw says it is so about 'boomer$' -- in a book and a CNBC upcoming TV special.

Outreach to link seniors and computers -- more needed.  Although there are multiple approaches to opening up the vast world of the Internet to seniors, rarely do they reach all the way into the home.

The year of the 'care'. As one VC executive, Andy Donner of Physic Ventures, noted recently, this is the year of the 'care'. There seems to be a growing list of vendors who are trying to offer some sort of 'keep in touch' product that connects an older person with family members who may live elsewhere.  The basic element is to provide some means to signal 'concerned about you' from family members and obtain the response 'I'm all right' from the older family member back to them -- accompanied by the ability to react in the event that the response is not received.

So much iHoopla about the iPad. But as the famous saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity and folks at Apple must be having a great time with this. The geeks have weighed in, plenty of snippy negative commentary has been spewed about the Apple iPad (including lots of sophomoric humor about the product name).

Medicine turned into healthcare, doctors became providers, small coffee cups became tall, exercise became fitness, recycling became a sustainability tactic. So it has come to pass that politically correct eventually becomes...correct. And everything else, therefore becomes incorrect, inappropriate, or even offensive.

PCs and MACs represent growth markets in 2010... With the excitement (translate that -- lots of press) about a wide variety of PC-less connection choices for TV, radio, and books, one might almost think the PC and its MAC brethren were dead. Not so fast, PC sales are expected to grow 10% this year and MAC growth expectations are as high as 26%.

How is a market entrant doing? I have spent much of the past year looking at websites of tech companies in the aging-tech or digital health-tech areas. As part of this look, I am always trying to figure out how these companies are doing. Talking to the company executives is interesting, but the website, to me is very revealing and sometimes contradicts verbal descriptions of momentum. To me, these are visible indicators of company health: