AgeTech

You may have seen that rechargeable hearing aid commercial.   What was most striking about the commercial to a hearing industry outsider is the upfront commentary on what sounded like the predatory price of hearing aids – providers “charge whatever they can get.”   Several interesting aspects to that commercial – but the most interesting was that comment.  Who is ‘they’, how much can they ‘get’, and is there insurance that pays for them?  This is in an era where hearing aids have evolved to incorporate embedded AI, fall detection, direct connections for phone calls, and numerous other features and functions.

Should we expect change from aging-related tech policy initiatives? The answer is yes. Many are chosen, ideas are circulated from a long list of participants -- good ideas are collected and then the initiative is disbanded.  Maybe it is because the government changes a year later, but the net result is that recommendations appear, but measurements of status or success may not.  A good example from the past 3 years: the PCAST report, summarized in an ASA publication by David Lindeman: 'Independence, Technology, and Connection in Older Age."  A prior report recommending change in the hearing technology industry may have contributed to or encouraged the sale of PSAPs and the introduction in 2018 sale of over-the-counter hearing aids – and may have encouraged additional categories of hearing aids and the growth of interest in 'hearables.’  So to the degree that there is a connection, that’s a good outcome.

2019 Technology Market Overview is online this week. When assembling the 2019 tenth anniversary version, it was apparent that this year reflects change -- in the supply-demand balance in the overbuilt senior housing market, in policy changes driving health care services into the home, in market forecasts, and in the mix of vendors who serve the market.   It's in many ways a good-news/bad-news story.  Awareness is growing about an aging demographic, working longer and with longer life expectancy than previous generations.  At the same time, the technology market continues to expand in complexity, privacy and interoperability issues, while not effectively lowering cost of access or prices of useful devices -- and not necessarily boosting the availability of training on their benefits or use.  Here are four updated premises from the 2019 Market Overview of Technology for Older Adults:

The more things change...This is the tenth anniversary of the launch of this Market Overview of technology for ‘Aging in Place’, to be re-published in March 2019 – the category of offerings that help enable older adults to remain longer in their home of choice. The launch of that first report was timed in conjunction with the What’s Next Boomer Business Summit of 2009 and offered a chance to speak publicly about a market category that had been largely ignored by tech industry analysts.  As a long-time Forrester analyst, this seemed odd, not unlike the ‘tree falling in the forest’ cliché – if there is no market overview of tech categories, how do vendors position themselves in the market?