Why your aging parents have trouble using their phone – Business Insider
Source: Business Insider
I helped my mom set up her phone. It could have gone better.
My stepfather died a few months ago, after a long decade dealing with Parkinson’s disease. Doug was living in a care facility, and even though my mom visited all the time, for overall contact with the world — and just general fun — he relied on his phone and his iPad. But Parkinson’s is a neuromuscular disorder; eventually, Doug’s hands and fingers couldn’t reliably navigate a touchscreen or a keyboard. As his dementia worsened, he couldn’t really figure out how to buy stuff online anymore, much less how to manage a healthcare or banking website.
He started buying sketchy apps — probably without even realizing it — and sending disjointed, sometimes inappropriate emails and texts. We got worried he was going to do something bad with his bank accounts, or fall for a phishing attack. Apple’s operating system has a tool that lets you limit which apps a user can access; my mom pared Doug’s down to nearly nothing.
The thing is, Doug had been an IT guy. He loved computers. At work, he installed enterprise servers and helped maintain a citywide network. In his spare time he tinkered on a boat and built cabinets; he knew how to tie complicated knots. Doug had, I am saying, a technical mind. Right until the end, he wanted to FaceTime my mom, email his medical team, and buy stuff from West Marine. He just wasn’t able to.
Getting older doesn’t necessarily come with the kind of extreme disability Doug dealt with. But it inevitably brings to us all a bit of mental inflexibility and physical limitation. The ubiquitous gadgets and apps that are our windows onto the world aren’t made for any of that — they’re confusing, hard to use, ever-changing, and either too poorly or too well secured. And meanwhile, every sector of society is scrambling to trade storefronts for websites and human staff for AI chatbots.
Americans, meanwhile, are the oldest we’ve ever been. Many millennials are already old enough to need their phone flashlights to read the menu in a dimly lit restaurant, and the over-65 population is expected to grow from 60 million today to 82 million by 2050. Technology is designed by, and for, the young. So what happens when an unprecedented number of us are old?
Debaleena Chattopadhyay is a primary caregiver for her parents — her mom is 66, her dad is 73. That’s complicated, because Chattopadhyay is in Chicago and they live in India, where smartphone apps mediate just about every activity of daily life, from finances to healthcare to food delivery. “When my dad was still working, computerized banking was introduced, and he was very proud. He helped everyone,” Chattopadhyay says. “Now he can’t do anything.”
Still, strong dad energy will always prevail. The other day, Chattopadhyay tells me, a restaurant’s online order form so confused her dad that he just telephoned instead. But the guy on the phone told him he’d get a discount if he used the app. So her dad hung up, dragged himself to the restaurant, and had the guy who’d answered his call use the app to put in his order.
Chattopadhyay says that kind of technological madness is coming for all of us. And she would know — she’s a researcher at the University of Illinois Chicago who studies how older adults interact with computers. It’s a wide-open field, because the research from just a couple of decades back got a whole bunch of things terribly wrong.
In the early days of mobile phones and MP3s, researchers assumed that older people would be resistant to digital technology in any form — preferring, presumably, to shout at clouds or watch television with the volume turned way up. So the focus turned to developing tech meant to help old people with old-people things, like reminders to take their medications or games to aid their memory. Researchers also worked on creating elderized versions of familiar products, like phones with giant buttons.
Everyone hated that stuff. “If I tell you, ‘You’re old, you should use Facebook for Seniors,’ that’s infantilizing,” Chattopadhyay says. Older people want to do the same kinds of things with computers as anyone else — edit videos, talk to friends and family, share Spotify playlists, call an Uber, whatever. And they want to use the same, or similar, tools everyone does.
But it’s also true that with age, our eyesight and hearing get worse. Texting thumbs get arthritic. Memory gets slippery. And maybe most significantly, age can reduce what researchers call “fluid intelligence,” the cognitive flexibility that enables us to multitask and learn new things — like where the hell the damn search button went in the latest app update. Plus, older people kind of stop wanting to bother. How many versions of Word do you have to live through before deciding, eh, maybe I don’t need the new one?
That’s the core problem that even sophisticated digital natives face as they age. Innovative features, updated apps, and entirely new products are how tech companies grow and make money. They’re
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