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Aging Well The question of what technology can do to help the aging isn't academic anymore. Which is precisely why academics, including those at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, are working hard on ways to use technology to provide care and support for the aging. While the need is already great, the real battle lies ahead. That boom you hear comes from the baby boom generation --- 83 million strong. Every seven seconds a baby boomer turns 50. By 2010 the first of the boomers will reach retirement age. The hope is that seemingly cold technology can provide support and even warmth for the aging. For instance, over at Georgia Tech, visiting professor Itiro Siio is worried about the loneliness that often accompanies those who grow old away from the comfort of children and grandchildren. That's why Siio is putting the finishing touches on an unlikely high-tech device that seems to transport teddy bears great distances over the Internet. He hopes technology that warm and fuzzy might help restore the link between families. It's no longer common for grandparents and children to live in the same home, or even the same city. Siio, 45, hopes his device that automatically transports pictures of items such as teddy bears over the Internet will bring communication and comfort to the grandparents who receive them. With it, a child too young to send an e-mail can still communicate with a grandparent. In Gwinnett County, Tony Montemurro, 77, and retired since 1996, feels uncomfortable with technology --- at least for the moment. Frankly, computers drive him nuts. He calls himself a "slow learner" when it comes to computers, but he keeps trying. Forget teddy bears. He just wants to be able to use a PC and the Internet to keep in touch with his grandchildren in Wisconsin and Missouri. And Beth Mynatt, a professor at Tech and an expert in how technology can help the elderly, is beginning to notice what happens almost every time she speaks to a scholarly group. Instead of the usual citation checking and dry questions, her fellow academics lean forward in their seats when she speaks. It gets personal. "People start popping out of their typical academic shells and say, 'This is what is happening to me, in my own family.' " Early signs show, for an aging population, technology can mean the difference between living at home and moving into a nursing home. Mynatt, 35, said her research shows "probably not surprisingly, most often the decision to move from an independent setting to a facility is made by the children, not the adult in question, and is driven by anxiety --- not just of the current problem, but of future problems." Homes as nurses' aids Mynatt and her group of graduate students are using a project called the Aware Home Research Initiative to learn how to build a home that will serve as an almost robotic nurses' aid and companion to the aged. There's an actual house on 10th Street, wired up with video cameras in the kitchen and wireless tracking devices throughout, that's a virtual laboratory for how technology may some day offer independence to the aging. Which brings us back to Siio and the teddy bears. Not all problems of the aged involve slips and falls. Sometimes the problem is simply being alone and lonely, "losing touch with family far away" --- a problem already on Siio's mind since his own family is back in Japan. The visiting professor from Tamagawa University in Tokyo has devised a twin set of nightstand-like cabinets. In one cabinet, the one that would be in the grandchild's house, an Internet-connected camera snaps a photo each time a new item is placed in the drawer. So a new teddy bear, or a recently completed drawing in a coloring book, is captured as a digital image. The camera is automatically tripped when something is placed in the drawer. The image is then sent by Internet to a similar remote cabinet where a flat screen display in the bottom of the drawer gives an almost perfect image of the contents. When you take a casual glance, the high-quality image makes it seems as if the faraway teddy bear has materialized at grandmother's house. Meanwhile in the kitchen, graduate student Quan Tran has rigged up video cameras that capture every step in the cooking process. The electronic images are displayed in a panel near the stove. "So if a telephone call interrupts you and you forget what you've added and what you haven't, the photos remind you," she said. And in the living room of the house at Georgia Tech, there's a picture on the mantel. You can think of the woman you see as a virtual grandmother. Here's how she ties into the research being done at Tech. Imagine that same photograph, but now it sits on the mantel in your home. And the photograph is your aging mom, or grandmother who lives in, say, Denver. Walk up to the photograph and look a little closer. You'll see it is an electronic image being displayed on a flat panel computer screen. Touch the photograph in one place and a graph pops up, showing how often grandmother has moved from one room to the other during the day. Touch another spot and it will show the temperature both inside the house and outside. Motion sensors in the house, along with other monitoring devices, collect information and send it from Denver, over the Internet, to your home. While the technology may seem cold --- a way for children to avoid feeling guilty about not checking in with an aging relative by phone or in person --- that's not what testing has shown. Jim Rowan, who is 50 himself and a doctoral candidate at Tech working on the project under Mynatt, acknowledged that "technology can do that [offer a cold substitute for a warm problem], but the thing that was really amazing to me is that in field tests it has had just the opposite effect." Rowan said the monitoring system complete with portrait was tested with a grandmother and grandchild and "it caused phone calls, not substituted for them," presumably because of the sense of closeness it created. Families interviewed have liked the technology and so have the older people who are being monitored. Rather than feeling spied upon, they see it as a way to hold on to their independence. "Remember that they are motivated to stay in their own homes already," Mynatt said. "It's something that they want to do." You can't look at all the high tech in the house without wondering about the cost. Is this just one of those houses of the future that will interest scientists but never make it into your grandmother's life because it's just too expensive? Rowan and Mynatt think the technology will migrate nicely from the labs to average homes. For one thing, the cost of technology must be balanced against the staggering cost of living in an assisted care facility --- an "old folks" home. For another, much of that gee-whiz technology is already affordably priced right on the shelves of your favorite computer store, or perhaps it's already in your home. Wireless networks within the home link the various monitoring devices to a broadband Internet connection. The motion sensors used are the kind that come with almost any home security system. Flat panel displays are now included with the PCs you'd buy from Gateway and Dell. It's all there, ready to happen. Rowan estimates that the monitoring system using the portrait on the mantel could be done right now for "a couple of thousand dollars." Gadgets help elderly Not all technology has to be that elaborate to provide help to the aging. Remember Montemurro, the 77-year-old Gwinnett County man who gets so frustrated with his PC? Thanks to PC classes at the Gwinnett County Senior Net organization --- geared to teach those 50 and older --- he's gradually finding his way. Meanwhile, his wife, Emily, 74, enjoys the vast amount of information she finds on the Internet. She recently used the family PC to buy airline tickets to visit the grandkids in St. Louis. And one of the teachers at Senior Net, Virginia Scibona --- a woman who, at age 67, has taken to computers like a duck to a June bug --- has found joy too. Computers have become a lifeline to her, a way to e-mail "friends and family all over the country." Scibona not only uses a PC, she carries about a hand-held Palm to keep track of phone numbers and dates. That gives her the memory of a 19-year-old. "When someone says 'I wish I had Mary Jones' phone number,' I just pop it up on my Palm," she said. "I even finally taught my husband to use the VCR," she said. Perhaps that sounds like a small victory. But those are also early signs that technology is working to provide mobility to old legs, and a perfect memory to those who might otherwise forget. Mynatt thinks that if a PC can do so much now, technology developed specifically for the aged can do even more. She has her own reasons for believing the stakes are high. "My grandmother is now in a retirement center and I'm the only child of an only child," she said. "It has been very interesting to watch how she has changed as she moved from an independent home setting. She is surrounded by people who remind her that she is old. She no longer does the same things, even though she is physically the same." Mynatt hopes technology can take people like that home again.
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