A Whole New Way of Being Old: Book Review of The New Mobile Age

The recently released overview of health care for the aging by Dr. Joseph Kvedar and his collaborators, The New Mobile Age: How Technology Will Extend the Healthspan and Optimize the Lifespan, is aimed at a wide audience of people who can potentially benefit: health care professionals and those who manage their clinics and hospitals, technologists interested in succeeding in this field, and policy makers. Your reaction to this book may depend on how well you have asserted the impact of your frontal cortex over your amygdala before reading the text–if your mood is calm you can see numerous possibilities and bright spots, whereas if you’re agitated you will latch onto the hefty barriers in the way. Kvedar highlights, as foremost among the culture changes needed to handle aging well, is a view of aging as a positive and productive stage of life. Second to that comes design challenges: technologists must make devices and computer interfaces that handle affect, adapt smoothly to different individuals and their attitudes, and ultimately know both when to intervene and how to present healthy options. As an example, Chapter 8 presents two types of robots, one of which was accepted more by patients when it was “serious” and the other when it was “playful.” The nuances of interface design are bewildering. The logical argument in The New Mobile Age proceeds somewhat like this: Wholesome and satisfying aging is possible, but particularly where chroni...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Digital Health Genomic Medicine Healthcare Devices Medical Robots mHealth Mobile Apps Personalized Medicine Affective Computing Aging Analytics Behavioral Change Behavioral Health Elder Care Geriatrics Source Type: blogs