IT developers, don’t assume that seniors are anti-technology or even technophobic.
“Education is a stronger predictor of Internet usage than age,” Susannah Fox, CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services, said Monday at the White House Conference on Aging.
Fox, who is due to give the closing keynote at MedCity ENGAGE on Wednesday, related the story of showing the Internet to her grandmother, since deceased, for the first time, back in 1995. “I was born too soon,” Fox’s recalls her grandmother saying.
That was a common theme among a group of six panelists in a late-afternoon session on technology and the future of aging. Donna Levin, co-founder of Care.com, an online marketplace for finding caregivers and other family services, said that the company’s fastest-growing business segment is the 50-plus age group.
While 50 or even 60 is not exactly elderly these days, consumers of all ages just want to buy things that work. “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the service,” said Tom Parkinson, senior vice president and CTO of grocery delivery service Peapod.
When Parkinson and his brother Andrew launched Peapod in 1990, he was a delivery driver in addition to a developer. Parkinson remembers making far more deliveries to seniors than he had expected.
In those days before the World Wide Web, users connected to Peapod with dial-up modems and dedicated software, not exactly a user-friendly method compared to today’s technology; it turned out that people were ordering groceries on Peapod for their elderly parents. Plenty of those adult children are now moving into retirement themselves, and have remained loyal, tech-savvy customers of Peapod as the user interface has improved.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“Simple is always the best for all customers,” Parkinson said during the session, which was Webcast live.
Other panelists agreed. Services like Peapod and ride-sharing giant Uber help people “live life as normal,” said Meghan Joyce, Uber’s East Coast general manager. (Interestingly, on the same day an Uber executive was at the White House at the request of the Obama administration, the San Francisco-based company was the target of criticism from Democratic presidential hopeful and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.)
“Technology should be about connecting us and not dividing us,” said Fox.
There does, however, have to be a balance between form factor, performance, usability and comprehension. Fox, for one, spoke in favor of seamless, “invisible” technologies. “I am hoping we choose the road where technology disappears,” she said.
Charles Wallace, a professor of computer science at Michigan Technological University, disagreed to an extent. “The more invisible things get, the harder it is for people to get their heads around,” said Wallace. “We spend a great deal of time explaining the cloud” to consumers who can’t initially grasp the idea of data being stored in some esoteric place.
Photo: YouTube user U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
