Growing up, I lived close to a nursing home.  My family use to go to this nursing home because it had a church in it too.  During that time in my childhood, I use to see the elderly often.  Honestly, it usually made me sad, especially those that were not as coherent.

While sometimes I question if technology is good for employment in the short term, for the elderly, technology can be an incredible benefit!

While we’re all aware of the hearing aids and other medical devices such as a pace maker, I believe that technology for the elderly is just starting to be realized.  Much like the old TV series, “The 6 million dollar man”, bionics should be doable by now, or perhaps an exoskeleton of some sort.  I think the Segway could just be the start.  Perhaps in the future, the elderly could use more accommodating but similar devices in concept to replace wheelchairs and the like.  Perhaps vehicles could be automated so that the user could just tell the machine a location and the machine would take the person there without any manual intervention.

What I think would be really exciting and an area to be explored is virtual reality for the elderly.  Wouldn’t it be great to get plugged into a machine and have full body motion, like the movie “the Matrix”.  The elderly could visit Paris, or go water skiing, or anything think that they desired instead of being confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home.  Of course they would know that it’s just virtual reality, but it could be a great experience.

Now some of you may think virtual reality would be a trick and a waste of life for the elderly, but I disagree.  After all, look at many of the non-elderly generation, many of them watch reality shows, which in my opinion is just a waste of life too.

Hopefully, in the future, technology can benefit the elderly in other ways too, especially with robotics and virtual software.

Just thinking out loud,

MR