Aging US Challenges Tech R&D
From: Investor's Business Daily - 05/12/2005 -  P. A4
By: Julie Vallone

Tech companies are beginning to recognize the potential rewards they stand to
reap from the aging baby boomer population, a segment whose needs were
largely ignored until recently. "Because there is now a significant number of
older adults using the technology, and in a position to buy products,
manufacturers and designers are starting to pay attention to them," says
Florida State University psychology professor Dr. Neil Charness. Bentley
College's Design and Usability Testing Center founder William Gribbons says
few industries realize the benefits they can gain from designing products for
seniors, with the exception of financial services and health care. Financial
service firms are attempting to enhance access for older customers by
increasing the user-friendliness of customer service systems, while the
health care industry plans to drive costs down by augmenting health care
management via technology; Gribbons lists doctors checking up on patients
daily through email as one example. Other companies developing and marketing
more senior-friendly technology include IBM, which has devised a computer
mouse adaptor that eliminates excessive cursor movements for users with hand
tremors. For people who are incapable of even moving a mouse, NaturalPoint
has developed SmartNav, a system that employs an infrared camera that tracks
a reflective dot worn on the user's forehead, thus allowing users to control
a cursor and navigate a computer non-manually. And Elia Life Technology is
working on a new raised alphabet that vision-impaired users can read faster
than Braille or the raised Roman alphabet, along with a tactile keyboard, a
printer that generates raised text, and a easily refreshed tactile display
that uses protracting and retracting pixels.  

Links:
Neil Charness
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~charness/

Design and Usability Testing Center
http://ecampus.bentley.edu/dept/usability/

William M. Gribbons 
http://www.bentley.edu/academics_research/faculty_research/faculty_database/faculty_detail.cfm?id=2275

SmartNav
http://www.naturalpoint.com/smartnav/