digital health

You know the experience.  You walk into the lobby of a medical practice, and the sign tells you to sign in at the kiosk. You drop your license in the slot – but the software is having a down day, and so a person emerges from behind the glass to debug it.  Meanwhile another person checks you in.  So their time savings from the device evaporate. The irritation of the patients trying to sign in grows – one announces how much he hates technology.

Conversation is becoming more interesting with ChatGPT 4.0.  For one thing, with its memory feature enabled, it easily inhales everything the conversationalist has ever said online, or even excludes the speaker’s previous remarks upon request. How can this be helpful to older adults? A tool that learns from multiple sources, aggregates if desired into a summary, incorporates links to sources, and then remembers the whole interchange – maybe that moves it into another tier of utility. The conversation could have been about travel possibilities, about transportation options, about more comfortable walking shoes – or brainstorming places to go on a future trip. Next interaction – do you want to hear what’s new in locations you viewed previously?

Strength-related tech for stronger women?  With all of the digital health startups and corresponding $10 billion in investment, I was curious as to why none are helping women gain strength, which is known to be a direct link to maintaining balance and improving bone health, not to mention helping to prevent falls. I remember a book published years ago called Strong Women Stay Young, specifically focused on older women. The author, Miriam Nelson,  noted the importance of strength training and bone health – and in particular, avoiding osteoporosis, suffered by one in five women aged 50+.  It turns out, none of the 2024 digital health investments that are focused on women ($1.1 billion) tackled this dimension of women’s health.

An impressive process was launched in 2013 at an AARP convention in Atlanta. Groups of older adults were shown how to use tablets. A presenter demonstrated and 4H volunteers sat at tables with the attendees to show them how to use them.  The program was called Mentor Up – and the idea was that young people could/should volunteer to help older adults with a device that was unfamiliar and baffling. At that time, the iPad was just three years old. The older adults in the room almost certainly did not own one -- at that time, 26 million older adults were NOT online. So their surprise and delight at what it could do made an impression. The role of young people was equally impressive -- and should be a role model for today.

Five years ago -- this site looked at the state of dementia-related technologies.  The more things (the tech offerings) change, the more their purpose and function remain the same.  Today there are websites that list gadgetry for managing and living with dementia.  There are research reports about technology for dementia care that include social robots, apps, or GPS locators. There are thoughts about implementation factors, articles from AARP, books about dementia care and many other knowledgeable observations and sources of guidance. Today 6.9 million Americans have dementia, slightly fewer than the 7 million estimated in 2020, though growth projections about dementia through 2030 were large and lon longer timeframe ones are even larger.  So what are the general tech categories that can help at the various stages?

One might think that the Consumer Electronics Show is about consumer electronics.  Not really. It is about tech concepts and possibilities, and possibly new or near-term products, that can lead to future products and/or distribution in the market. Whether in TVs, cars, drones, wearables, accessibility tech, home appliances or headsets, this international show with its 150,000 attendees has an ‘AI Everywhere’ (surprise!) theme. Attendees help both startups and established players to gain media and market attention and maybe even meet a few distribution partners or funders.  Here are 10 from this year’s show:

HLTH 2024 wrapped up last week in Las Vegas – where else?  AI was a big topic – transformational, embedded in health tech, capitalizing on the buzz. Or growing caution, concern about regulation, data quality issues, depending on the perspective. Others fretted about the state of healthcare in the US (not good), physician burnout (not good) and the health status of Americans, especially the mental health of young people (not good).  All these despite the promise of AI-enablement of laborious processes, hospital at home, conversational AI, new drugs, and many tech innovations. Looking through the exhibitor list, fifty-eight companies self-identified as AgeTech at HLTH.