Consumer Electronics Show Sees Aging Services as New Frontier

AAHSA’s Center for Aging Services Technologies entered the 2009 consumer electronics space this past week by co-sponsoring the Silvers Summit at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The Silvers Summit, an exhibit pavilion and day-long education program, was the first foray into aging for this massive convention on new consumer electronics. It was great to see home monitoring and brain health technologies exhibited among the mp3 players, home audio systems and big screen televisions that are the signature of CES.

With more than 130,000 people in attendance and six massive convention centers hosting exhibits, it’s hard to tell your story at CES. But baby boomers and aging technology emerged as a major legacy of this CES. Many major media outlets focused stories on aging, including USA Today, the AFP, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Los Angeles Times, which had an extensive interview with Dr. Majd Alwan, director of CAST. Dr. Alwan spoke at the Silvers Summit’s press conference on Jan. 8 and educational session on Jan. 10. Dakim, a CAST member, Carnegie Mellon University’s Quality of Life Technologies (QoLT) Center, and the Continua Alliance were also on both panels. In addition, CAST members Intel, GrandCare and Meridian Health exhibited in CES’s Digital Health pavilion, along with Halo Monitoring, which provides wearable cardiac, activity and fall monitoring. The CAST panel on creating the Home for Life included members Sheri Peifer of Eskaton, John Brady of Life Alert Emergency Response, David Stern of QuietCare by Living Independently, which is now part of GE Healthcare, and Charlie Hillman of GrandCare Systems.

A major theme of CES this year was convergence between different types of technologies to integrate capabilities and simplify use. Eric Dishman, chairman of CAST and director of Intel’s Digital Health Group, focused on this during his keynote at the Silvers Summit. He encouraged the technology companies there to disrupt their traditional thinking to create a new health care system that is holistic and patient-centered instead of fragmented and disease-specific. It was also interesting to see so much of a focus on research and science at a conference that is about marketing. Eric’s presentation was filled with data about consumer preferences and health care outcomes. Henry Mahncke, Ph.D.,  of Posit Science debunked the myth that crossword puzzles are a key to maintaining brain health and presented a range of peer-reviewed studies about its cognitive training programs.

More than 200 people attended the Silvers Summit education conference and both the sessions and the hallway discussions were full of talk about how technology companies and providers can work together to converge their interests in providing quality and accessing the growing aging market. Companies like Celery, which offers a product to provide email without a computer, to organizations like Doro, which provides easy-to-use cell phones and amplified phones, attended. There were many providers of aging services who came to learn how they can continue to be in front of the technology wave in aging services, including Alan Sadowsky of MorseLife, Kathy Bakkenist of Ecumen, Allen Mehta of Southern California Presbyterian Homes, Joe Gerardi of American Baptist Homes of the West, and representatives of Air Force Village in San Antonio, Texas.