Prime Time: A New Look At Aging

The other ways technology helps vision

It's nice to know that science is working on improving our eyesight. But it doesn't work for everyone, and it isn't available to all, even for those for whom it would work. And useful as they are, Braille and talking books are substitutes for vision, not enhancements.

So the other trick is to make things easier to see. There are now cell phones with big buttons, websites have standards for accessibility, including options for larger typefaces, etc. Road signs can be made clearer using technology (who knew paint could be so high-tech?) and computer studies of eye movements can help us put signs in places where people actually look.

But for me, the best technology is still under construction. Head mounted displays or goggles still aren't ready for prime time. But when they get the bugs worked out, you will be able to put on something that looks like a pair of sunglasses, but will essentially open up an almost magical world, showing enhanced pictures of what's in front of you--or a normal computer screen, or television or film. It will have the capability of adding text information near the pictures, such as the name (and age, and personal details) of the person walking towards you. It will also warn you of obstacles and challenges--much like the technology that is being introduced in modern cars. And, also like in cars, it will come with maps.

Yes, it'll take getting used to and will feel wildly new and different. But that's part of the fun, right?

Technology and vision

One of the most rapidly evolving areas of technological progress is in optics. It's happening for a variety of reasons--companies want to make better computer games, the military wants to provide better equipment to its soldiers, movie makers are working on 3D technology to get people back in the cinemas, and virtual reality may change the way we experience the world.

So it's no surprise that the number of patents filed in optics is growing at 5% a year, which is really robust. But what are the likely ramifications for seniors?

Stem cell experiments improved the vision of elderly, umm, rats in experiments. The aim of the research is to combat macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness for people over the age of 55.

The principal reason seniors abandon driving motor vehicles is deteriorating eyesight. So cars that drive themselves (yes, really) may help mobility for seniors, and improved parking technology and cameras replacing mirrors might go even further.

Audio books can be a bit bothersome, but text to speech software allows you to choose what you want to listen to. It works both ways, if you're tired of writing--or even tired of hitting computer keys.

And the world of implants continues to improve and expand. More and better retina implants will help millions.

Making our senses work better--technology and hearing loss

Since I elected to spend 5 years cutting down trees bent over a chainsaw with my ear three inches from the chainsaw motor, I am pretty used to saying, What? or more commonly, Huh?

Close to a third (29%) of seniors are hearing impaired, and that percentage rises as they get more senior, reaching 47% for those over age 75. But how much of a difference does that make in day to day living?

The NIH Senior Health site lists some: "People with hearing loss have trouble fully participating in everyday life. They may mistake words in a conversation, miss directions or warnings, or leave a ringing doorbell unanswered. Older people who can't hear well may become depressed or withdraw from others to avoid feeling frustrated or embarrassed about not understanding what is being said.

"They may become suspicious of relatives or friends who they believe "mumble" or "don't speak up" on purpose. Hearing loss can cause older people to become more isolated and can even put them in harm's way if they are unable to respond to warnings or hear sounds of impending danger.

"Sometimes older people are mistakenly thought to be confused, unresponsive, or uncooperative just because they don't hear well."

As a techno-optimist, it didn't take me long to find examples of how technology is addressing those with differing levels of hearing loss. Hearing aids are getting smaller, more powerful and more intelligent--but a lot more is going on, as well:

(From the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association)

What are Assistive Listening Devices?

An assistive listening device (ALD) is any type of device that can help you function better in your day-to-day communication situations. An ALD can be used with or without hearing aids to overcome the negative effects of distance, background noise, or poor room acoustics. So even though you have a hearing aid, ALDs can offer greater ease of hearing (and therefore reduced stress and fatigue) in many day-to-day communication situations. Hearing aids + ALDs = Better listening and better communication!

What are examples of ALDs?

Personal frequency modulation (FM) systems are like miniature radio stations operating on special frequencies assigned by the Federal Communications Commission. The personal FM system consists of a transmitter microphone used by the speaker and a receiver used by you, the listener. The receiver transmits the sound to your hearing aid either through direct audio input or through a looped cord worn around your neck.
Personal FM systems are useful in a variety of situations such as listening to a travel guide or book review, in a classroom lecture, in a restaurant, in a sales meeting, or in a nursing homes or senior center.

FM systems are also used in theaters, places of worship, museums, public meeting places, corporate conference rooms, convention centers, and other large areas for gathering. In this situation, the microphone/transmitter is built into the overall sound system. You are provided with an FM receiver that can connect to your hearing aid (or to a headset if you don't wear a hearing aid).

Infrared systems are often used in the home with TV sets, but, like the FM system, they can also be used in large settings like theaters.
Sound is transmitted using infrared light waves. The TV is set at a volume comfortable for family members. The infrared system transmitter transmits the TV signal to your receiver, which you can adjust to your desired volume. Thus, TV watching as a family becomes pleasurable for all. While it is not too loud for family members with normal hearing, the volume is just right for you because it is adjusted by you through your individual receiver.

Induction Loop Systems are most common in large group areas. They can also be purchased for individual use.
An induction loop wire is permanently installed (perhaps under a carpet) and connects to a microphone used by a speaker. (In the case of individual systems, a wire loop is laid on the floor around you and the speaker.) The person talking into the microphone creates a current in the wire which makes an electromagnetic field in the room. When you switch your hearing aid to the "T" (telecoil/telephone) setting, your hearing aid telecoil picks up the electromagnetic signal, and you can adjust its volume through your hearing aid.

One-to-one communicators. Sometimes in a restaurant, nursing home situation, or riding in a car, you want to be able to easily hear one person. Or perhaps you are delivering a lecture or running a meeting and a person in the audience has a question. You can give the person a microphone to speak into. The sound is amplified and delivered directly into your hearing aid (or headset if you don't have a hearing aid), and you can adjust the volume to your comfort level. When using the one-to-one communicator, the speaker does not have to shout, private conversations can remain private, and, when in a car, your eyes can remain on the road!

There are many, many other ALDs such as telephone amplifying devices for cordless, cell, digital, and wired phones; amplified answering machines; amplified telephones with different frequency responses; paging systems; computers; wake-up alarms.
Your audiologist can provide you with additional information on ALDs.

Are there communication devices besides those that assist listening?

Yes, there are visual systems that can be used alone or in combination with listening devices and hearing aids. Persons who are hard of hearing or deaf, or even persons who have no hearing loss, can benefit. There are also alerting devices that signal you when a sound occurs. For example, there are doorbell, knock-at-the-door, or phone alerting devices; fire alarm/smoke alarm devices; baby-crying devices or room-to-room sound alerting systems; vibrating clock alarms; vibrating paging systems; and vibrating watch alarms. Many use strobe light or conventional light to alert you; others use vibrating systems to alert you.

Examples of visual systems include the following:

Text telephones, which allow phone conversations to be typed and read rather than spoken and heard
Computerized speech recognition which allows a computer to change a spoken message into a word processed document
Closed-captioning TV, which allows text display of spoken dialogue (All TVs with screens of at least 13 inches diagonal measurement must have built-in captioning.)
Note taking, which allows a hard of hearing person to concentrate on listening and watching a speaker while a trained person takes notes (This has been used in schools not only for students who are deaf or hard of hearing but also for students who are unable to write.)

But who will do the laundry? Robotics and aging, continued

Japan is one of three countries that focus on robotics--the other two are South Korea and the U.S. Here in the US we specialise, and focus on military uses (which later get adapted for civilian use). South Korea does heavy industry and some domestic robotics.

But Japan--Japan! Oh, what they are doing, and oh how we will use it.

"New household robots in Japan are not only capable of pouring a drink, but of cleaning up the dishes afterward. Japanese inventers are now taking on the challenge of creating a robot that is even capable of cooking. The International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo this week revealed prototype robotic chefs flipping Japanese pancakes, serving sushi, slicing vegetables and performing various tasks in the kitchen."

"As home to one of the world's fastest aging populations, Japan is experiencing a boom in robotic developments. With the increase in need for assistance for their elderly, a growing number of companies are investing heavily in the future of household robotics, many of which are designed to assist daily life for the elderly as well as the infirm – a job that many young people are unwilling to take."

"Tomio Sugiura, president of Sugiura Kikai Sekkei, which manufactured the vegetable-slicing robot, envisions a robot in every home in the near future. He says, "Nowadays, almost every family has a car. In the near future, every family would be having a humanoid robot that can help out various things at home.”

What do seniors need help with?

Looking at what technology can do and where it's going, it seems like an endless list of possibilities. So maybe it's better to start by looking at what seniors need. As a future senior myself, I have a vested interest in getting this right--so please add your own wish list in the comments section.

Senses: Seniors seem to need help hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. (Technology is all over this).

Moving: Walking, driving, bending, crouching

Cognition: Remembering, making connections, staying connected, staying awake... (well...)

Eating and digestion: Eating what we like, liking what we eat, processing it efficiently and eliminating it in good time and in good order (and especially when it suits us).

Autonomic processes (things we do without thinking about it): breathing, pumping the heart...

Retaining strength

Sex: Both physical function and maintaining interest.

So, okay, what did I leave out?

Activity, work and aging

I would like to live to be 100 or more. So how long should I keep working? Then, what should I replace work with?

In his book 'Dare to be 100,' Dr. Walter Bortz puts forward the suggestion that we should work until age 80--which would suit the performance of my current investment strategy just fine. Ten years ago the thought would have filled me with dread--work until 80? But I am doing work that I enjoy right now, and which is not physically taxing. If my eyes hold out, the idea no longer scares me.

This would give some of my investments to um, (cough, cough) mature a bit, and would relieve my pension strategy from the responsibility of supporting me for the entire 33 years between 67 and 100--I think I can squeeze 20 years out of it.

My wife is similarly inclined, and similarly positioned. Neither of us has considered stacking shelves at the local grocery store--she's a translator and I'm an analyst. New kinds of workers, actually. Neither of us would have been able to do what we do thirty years ago. Translation was a very local profession before the fax and then the internet. Data capture was too slow to generate sufficient revenue to support the army of analysts that now exist.

My message--okay, my messages are, that being one of Peter Drucker's 'knowledge workers' is much more fun than what I used to consider work, and that it's remarkably easy to move into this line of work. I know people who are proofreading at 80 and teaching at even older ages.

The key is to keep learning something useful. I've been studying French sporadically. I now want to learn how to make databases do what I want them to do, by studying a series of commands known as SQL. There are tutorials for both available for free on the internet. So why not?

Technology and aging--the natural way of progress

Twenty years ago, one focus of technology for seniors was the idea of home alerts. Living centers had big, bulky tags with alarm buttons that could be pressed, sending a message to the security guards at the center and prompting a response. Then, along came the mobile phone, email and webcams... We still have (and still need) those alarm buttons--but not as many. General purpose advances in other fields have filled much of the need.

I have written previously about some obvious winning technologies--robotics, nanotechnology and biochemistry. And I'm convinced that these will make life and aging easier for all of us. But I don't think I've been able to predict the huge winner, the game changer, the one invention that will change our definition of aging, of ability.

That's because I'm convinced that it will be some odd combination of two of those scientific disciplines, plus contributions from other technology sectors, that will do the job, and I'm not sure exactly how it will play out. But I'm 100% convinced that play out it will.

If you follow computing at all, you may have heard of Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors occupying a given area will increase every couple of years. It's not a law of physics--it's an estimate of industrial productivity that has become a goal for producers of microprocessors and a roadmap for those who design software to see where the industry will be in the near future.

What has made Moore's Law come true is actually thousands of minor improvements in a number of very different engineering issues, from circuit design and silicon processing to battery life and software improvements. It's been literally thousands of improvements that were completely unpredictable as individual events but hugely predictable as far as their overall impacts.

The same will be true for technology and aging. The market for suppliers is huge--they can get rich off of geezers like us--and thousands of companies big and small are turning their considerable resources to finding ways of doing things faster, better and cheaper. Which means in the end that we will have better lives--that the period between 70 and 100 years of age will become a normal and productive period of life that won't be frightening, or isolating, or depressing. It will just be the next stage.

Independent or assisted living?

Whether you're a senior yourself or trying to help a parent or friend, technology is working to make it easier for seniors to retain differing levels of independence--and more importantly, a sense of self-worth and dignity.

At one level it all seems like a rearguard battle, fighting on several fronts to continue a normal life, using computers for communication and robotics for cleaning, etc., etc. But from another point of view, it's an exciting experiment in life before death, where the freedom technology buys gives you the time and energy to focus on the important aspects of life that students and workers often dream of contemplating, but cannot due to time constraints.

Tools For Independence links to a number of useful sites, listing them from A (Ability Hub) to T (Technology for Long Term Care). You'd best start navigating.

And agitating. Technology costs money. Other interest groups are successful in getting help from manufacturers, distributors, inventors and yes, even government. They do it by banding together. If you see toys that will help you or your loved ones live a better life, find others in the same situation and ask for help in the form of discounts, trial periods, subsidies and grants. It works for others--it will work for you.

More on biotechnology and aging

If you're going to be with us over the long haul (and we certainly hope that you will) you'll probably become familiar with certain names. In nanotechnology, you'll become familiar with Ray Kurzweil. In robotics, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. And just for biotechnology and aging, there's Aubrey de Grey, who is passionate about defeating aging. He works in genetics at Oxford University in the UK.

De Gray has been writing about aging for over a decade. His latest article in the Guardian is pretty much of a summary. His main points:

1. Science can 'beat' aging, which kills about 100,000 people a day

2. It can do so without increasing frailty or bringing on some other imaginary horrors associated with increased longevity, such as overpopulation, unequal access to the benefits of long life, boredom, etc.

3. That because we look at deterioration due to aging as both horrible and inevitable, we try pretty hard not to think about it at all.

The article is here. His website is here. This is the start of a long discussion, so let's start by getting some of the basics down.

Biotechnology and aging

If nanotechnology seems too much like science fiction, biotechnology is working here and now to lessen the impacts of aging--with the goal of even reversing parts of the process.

The principal areas where biotechnology is applied include cloning, applications of stem cell technology, genetic testing for future vulnerability to diseases such as Alzheimers and more.

Let's talk first about cloning. Although you may think of this as creating a replica of yourself, that is far in the future, and prohibited to boot. What is more immediate is cloning a kidney or a liver from your cells and transplanting the cloned organ into you. Currently, if you get a transplant from someone else, you also get a lifetime prescription for drugs that suppress your immune system, so that your body doesn't reject the transplant. But if it's your organ, cloned from your cells, that's not an issue.

The other problem that this would solve is the waiting list for organs. (Are you listed as an organ donor yet? Why not?) Currently far too many people die while waiting for a compatible organ to become available. But if you're the donor, that again is not an issue.

It's been done, in experimental surgery. It is not commonplace as yet. But it's coming soon, and to an (operating) theater near you.

This is not science fiction. The problems to be solved in making it commonplace (and there are quite a few) are more engineering than conceptual. Now that President Obama has changed the rules regarding stem cell research, that engineering will be done soon.

The fun begins when we start using this technology, not to replace failed organs and systems, but to restore vitality and function...