Technology and Aging

Advances in Information Technologies have propelled the development of a diversity of solutions to assist aging. These range from service robots that help older adults perform activities of daily living to monitoring systems for early detection of clinical conditions such as frailty or dementia. The evaluation of these technologies imposes several challenges, due to issues such as the risk inherent in evaluating health outcomes and the nature of emerging technologies that could be unreliable, might be used at unpredictable periods of time, and support implicit interactions, that is, the technology is not at the center of attention of the user, but rather it peripherally supports the task at hand. This chapter describes some of these challenges, exemplified with different assistive technologies and shows how they can be evaluated at different stages of development. In addition, we describe how emerging computing technology can be used to support clinical research on aging. In particular, we show how mobile computing systems can be used to monitor clinical variables and health outcomes in interventions for aging. We illustrate the potential for these technologies with an example of a monitoring platform for mobile phones that can be used to measure parameters associated with frailty, and a videogame that uses a natural user interface to measure muscle strength while the user focuses on playing, and can be used for early detection of sarcopenia.