Seniors

Will it take a tsunami to create a coherent vision of more successful aging?  It was a disaster. On March 11 of this year, one-third of the 16,000  Japanese tsunami deaths were among the 65+, no doubt embarrassing the citizens and government, who most likely believed they had done a good job of providing for an aging population. An article in The Gerontologist spells out why:  In 1989 the Japanese government developed a vision for long-term care, refined in 2000 with its own slogan "from care by family to care by society” complete with "policy to make home, community-based and institutional services a universal entitlement" based on physical and mental status regardless of family availability and economic status.

What are the basic facts about boomer-senior connectivity?  Pew Research and others have been releasing report after report about technology use, but without a summary sheet, marketers might not be able to see the forest for the trees. So here are the basics from the past year of Pew-published surveys – to my knowledge, the only source for this number of categories that include 50+ age cohorts:

Patience, patience, when it comes to robots and elder care.  When it comes to robots to assist with caregiving and the elderly, we want to believe. It was just 2 years ago that Gecko Systems issued a press release saying that they expected "Medicare/Medicaid Payments to Increase Personal Robot Demand." Makers of the CareBot, the company announced its dealer program in June 2010 -- but it is unclear whether the company has moved into commercial release. It was just 3 years ago that the uBOT-5 (UMass Amherst) was offered up as having the potential to provide elder care for aging baby boomers.