EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Aging 2.0 has been working over the last four
reality. This will involve bringing care into the community through strategies such as telecare. Keeping people gainfully employed, physically active and out and about will also be a challenge. These are all key to combatting loneliness, a huge problem in the US which has been linked with direct health consequences. The writer William Gibson famously said, “The
future has already arrived – its just unevenly distributed.” Indeed, there are already a number of technologies existing in the marketplace today at the cutting edge of innovation that can help to improve quality of life and quality of care. Avatar-based services are able to deliver services remotely, triaging people at home without them having to come into hospital. Some even have microexpression recognition technology, so they will know whether a patient is being truthful or not when they say they’ve taken their medicine! Driverless cars come under the same umbrella.
In a survey, one of the biggest fears of older adults in America was losing their ability to drive. It leaves them isolated from the wider community, especially if access to public transport is difficult. Driverless cars can help to keep them integrated with society and allow them to stay independent. As well as this, clever new algorithms are currently being developed which can coordinate carpooling using Uber cars, creating an affordable and easily accessible alternative to public transport. Despite all this technology existing, we
don’t yet live in a “tech utopia”. Many of these companies that already have an incredible opportunity to improve the lives of older adults don’t even realise that they’re in the ageing space. They need to think about how older adults can use their technology, test their products with them and include them in their overall corporate strategic focus.
years with around 1000 companies, and the same barriers to market come up time and time again. 25 year olds can be passionate about changing the world for older adults, but many of them do not really understand what an 85 year old with dementia needs. Access to pilots needs to be improved – hospitals and care homes are currently reluctant to open their doors to for-profit companies. This lack of trust is limiting innovation and stopping people with good ideas from testing and scaling their concept. Distribution is probably the biggest barrier. The
ageing space is very fragmented – it doesn’t just involve taking an app, putting it on iTunes and making it available to millions of people in an instant. There are a lot of difficulties that must be overcome to scale a product to market. Business models also need to be improved to create more incentive for companies, and funding remains an issue for many ventures. Aging 2.0 has been taking these challenges
and creating programmes around them to support them. For example, there is a panel of around 800 consumers, and events such as challenges at universities and hackathons get older adults into a room talking to innovators, creating intergenerational conversations that help people understand the problems that need to be solved. Then there is the concept of co-creation.
Innovators, consumers and industry – these are three parts of the conversation that can work together to make a difference. People need to get products out there once they have a basic idea so that they can test it with all stakeholders, changing things iteratively until they eventually create a valuable product.
“Many companies have
great products but don’t even realise
they’re in the ageing space”
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