"Half the people here are bored," she said. Surfing the Internet "would keep their synapses firing."
Of course, when given the chance, many people use the Internet to gamble and look at porn, not to better themselves as Layton does. But this notion that technology is the key to maintaining not only the health of mature adults -- from the active 65-year-old retiree to the homebound 80-year-old -- but also their social lives and their minds is taking hold in boardrooms, research labs and government agencies.
Carolyn Layton, 74, whose severe arthritis restricts her to a motorized wheelchair in an assisted living home, keeps informed and in touch with friends and grandchildren via her computer and digital camera.
(Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
|
_____Sidebar_____
•
Making the Computer Easier to Use: Seniors interested in getting comfortable with the Internet can be hampered by physical characteristics of computers. A sophisticated world of "assistive devices" exists, primarily for people with physical disabilities, and some of these software programs and systems and devices can cost into the thousands of dollars.
|
| |
|
By technology, we're talking about more than defibrillators and hearing aids. We're talking retirement homes built with high-speed Internet connections; about souped-up caller ID that not only identifies who is calling but reminds you of the people you know in common and the subject of your last conversation. We mean "smart houses" that tell your daughter how many times you opened the refrigerator or got up off the sofa during the day, so she can call or stop by if she thinks something is wrong.
That high-tech companies are even focused on mature adults marks an industry sea change, said Ken Dychtwald, a gerontologist and president of Age Wave, a San Francisco marketing firm. When the Internet came along, "it was a party, and older people were not invited," he said. "All the language, the media, the marketing, Wired magazine, was about the new, the young, the hip, the cool, the next -- not about Grandma. To their amazing credit, even though they weren't invited, seniors began climbing the castle walls and crashing the party."
At first, the folks who made it over the wall didn't bring too many friends along. In 2000, just 15 percent of people over age 65 used the Internet, according to Susannah Fox, director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
"They were a very elite group. They were white, male, wealthy, very well educated and more likely to have a computer at home," Fox said. The demographics of this older group "looked like the Internet in 1993."
Today, men and women over 65 surf the Web in equal numbers, a Pew survey last May and June found. About 22 percent of non-Hispanic white Americans over age 65 are online, compared with 21 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of African Americans. But despite television commercials showing Grandma happily e-mailing snapshots of the grandkids to her friends, or guiltily sending off pictures from her adventure cruise vacation -- taken with her cell-phone camera, of course -- older Web surfers are still a minority. By comparison, 60 percent of Americans age 50 to 64 go online.
If you've been out of the job force and out of school for the past dozen years or so, you're not going to have had much exposure at all to the cyberworld, which went mainstream in that period, says Tom Tullis, senior vice president of human interface design at Fidelity Investments.
That's not to say that older Americans are suffering because they don't have a Gmail account.
"We have not had a need or an interest in technology and the Internet" from residents, said Jamison Gosselin, a spokesman for Sunrise Senior Living, the McLean company that operates more than 340 assisted living and independent living centers across the country. The residents are "fine with using the telephone or visiting, doing a lot of things they enjoyed doing 30 years ago."
