Think of the iPad for Your Elderly Parents, Boomers

I know that many Baby Boomers are still in the sandwich generation, caring for loved ones who now are elderly. It's been interesting to me to find out that some of us are using technology to enhance the quality of life of older people whose minds might be shining as brightly as ever, but who have some physical limitation that keeps them tethered to home or even in a nursing home.

In the past, it was difficult to envision packing mom or dad's expensive and fairly heavy laptop with them to go to assisted living, and impossible to figure out how to get Internet access for the laptop. However, with the advent of the iPad older people are bringing their connections to the outside world inside with them.

I recently watched a YouTube video and a news report showing a 99 year old woman with glaucoma rediscovering her love of reading and writing poetry using an iPad which lets her see the letters because of the contrasting screen. I also had been following some posts on the Boomer social networking site eons (www.eons.com) by a devoted daughter, screen named Techie44, who wanted to keep in touch with her 94 year-old mom even though the daughter would be spending the winter many miles away. I contacted Techie44 and asked if I could share her story and she graciously agreed.

In the beginning, Techie44 wasn't sure if the iPad would work for her mom, but she thought that her mother, who has rheumatoid arthritis and is in a nursing home, might be able to master it. I read through Techie44's posts as she weighed the pros and cons of getting what was then a brand new device for her mom. One thing was telling, however. Her mom was already familiar with email and wanted to have her email with her in the nursing home.

After showing her mother the family's iPad and how it worked, Techie44 ordered one for her with Wi-fi and 3G and set up her mother's email accounts to sync with the iPad. She also sent her mom some email so she could practice replying. Thinking about what would make her mom happy, she also loaded the iPad with the Christmas and classical music that her mother loves and put in pictures of the family, as well as some photos of the family camping vacations, since that's what her mom used to love to do.

Significantly, Techie44 signed up for Apple's MobileMe, an application that keeps mobile devices in sync. This was suggested to her by one of the other eons posters and it turned out to be very important. The iPad is the kind of device that can be picked up easily and just "walk out the door" of a nursing home. MobileMe has a feature called "Find my iPhone/iPad" and if someone walked away with the device, it could let Techie44 know where it is.

In an email, Techie44 told me she put a sticker on the outside of the iPad notifying everyone that it could be tracked and that she demonstrated how she could track the device to the people at the nurses station. She also told them that she would prosecute if the device were stolen.  Although she didn't tell me this, I expect she was hoping word of mouth would spread, and anyone thinking of walking away with the device would be forewarned. She also took the added precaution of selecting a pass code her mom could remember, so no one else could borrow the device.

Now I've always contended that MobileMe should be free, and not the $99/year product it is, but I'm willing to say that in this case it's worth the money. An added benefit of  MobileMe is that Techie44 can link her mom up to a "cloud" photo gallery, and the family can update and add pictures to it  from wherever they are, without having to load them directly onto the device. This was also pointed out by another eons poster.


So how is it going? Techie44's mom has arthritis, so hitting all the right icons and keys on the iPad is somewhat of a challenge, but she is managing, and enjoying the device. She does most of her typing herself but an aide helps her type long letters.  She's listened to her music on the device, but had a bit of a problem figuring out how to shut it off. Thinking ahead, Techie44 showed someone at the nursing home the ins and outs of the iPad so they could help her.

In addition, Techie44 signed her mom up for the Facebook app, so now "Granny" can follow her grand nieces and nephews on the social networking site. She also downloaded an app called iFish Pond that will help her mom pretend she is sitting by a pond when the weather gets cold.

Techie44 says that she made the right choice in getting her mom an iPad. A computer would  have had to sit on a table and her mother would have had to deliberately go to it. The iPad is easy for her mom to carry with her, and the 3G wireless solves the problem of getting Internet access in a nursing home, something that could prove to be nearly impossible.

One last thing: Techie44 says that the iPad has made a tremendous difference in the quality of her mother's life. She is connected to relatives she hadn't heard from for years and looks forward to receiving her email and photos from her family.  You can't find a more ringing endorsement than that.

I know the post above makes it look like I endorse the iPad or that I'm employed by Apple, but I assure you I am not. I simply believe that this genre of tablet has opened up a new era of computing and is beneficial for society. Many, many tablets are coming into the market soon, but right now Apple essentially stands alone. If the upcoming Linux Android tablets are as easy to use as the iPad, as this author predicts, they too will gain traction with the elderly and will add to the societal goal of helping them stay connected.

Online Community Gaming for Boomers--My first Guest Blogger Barbara Katz--Part One

I'm back from vacation, rested and relaxed, and I'm eager to begin writing this blog again.

This holiday season I received an email from a boomer family member, Barbara Katz, who said that she played Scrabble online with her family every week. I was intrigued, since this is an area of Boomer life I hadn't considered. Could online gaming enhance Boomers' lives? She thought so! So I asked her to write a blog entry for me about how to use the online site she favors, Pogo.com. I had gone to the site and was very confused by it. Barbara agreed to make it simple for me and for other Boomers to understand.

Here is Part One of her guest blog and her biography.

Barbara R. Katz spent decades of her career consulting with businesses in computer training, communication technology, and business services.  A writer for newsletters and special publications, she spends a great deal of time on various types of websites aside from gaming, including marketing, research and social networking.

How Boomers Resurrect Family and Friend Game Play with a FREE New Social Network Made Just for Fun!

Our whole family will play Scrabble together next Sunday night. The interesting thing is that some of us will be in different states. Mom is in PA; I'm in South Jersey; my brother is in Florida, and my daughter is in Mays Landing, NJ. But Sunday, we have a date, a virtual location and the game is on!

I remember a simpler time when a radio, a television and a phone were the only technology in the house. Back then, we played board games and cards at home with our family and friends. That was entertainment and we loved it. There was always something to play and usually someone to play with. Our games gave us something active to do together as we entertained ourselves in our homes after school, work, homework, chores, and a home-cooked meal eaten as a family were completed. That sounds pretty much like ancient times to me now.

As we Boomers began our own families, we shared these games with our own children. Well, for a while, anyway. Soon, everyone headed in different directions as their schedules got busier. At about the same time, the personal computer entered the home. We each vied for time using the shared PC until each member of the family "needed” their own computer for work, study, play and communication. Suddenly, there was no gathering around the dinner table or card table to share in anything together on so many nights. 

We were each alone in our own worlds. Isolation grew and relationships grew more distant. In-person communication dwindled, as did shared activities.We were too busy for fun.

Now the tide is turning to play together again-because of the PC!

Today, there are great, easy ways to engage in playtime together, even if we are in different places and life stages. We can now take those personal computers and turn things around. You can have family game time and friend game time no matter where your family and friends live.

There is a whole new companionable FUN world a few keystrokes away; a world of online games, where you can chat with your family and friends, right in the game room! You can once again be actively involved in play and talk together. It’s wonderful and I’ll bet you are going to love it!

Dealing with Isolation Just Got a Whole Lot Easier

Oftentimes, isolation is a problem in our world as we age and our households shrink. When your family and friends (or YOU) have moved away or are not available on the same schedule, you can also play games safely with strangers. You can maintain anonymity, have fun, and even make new friends on-line, playing together whenever you choose.

Also, when you want time for some private solace, and downtime is what you crave, you can also play solitaire (or many other games).

Does any of this sound good to you?

It is easy to do all this, and here is the road map. 

I’ve posed some questions below to help you get started.

Where do I go? There are many online game sites. My favorite place is in the land of pogo. An experienced game site, pogo has so many games to play and ways in which to do so. There are always tens-to-hundreds of thousands of people worldwide playing on pogo.com at any given time! Imagine that if you can! Surely, you will always be able to find someone with whom to chat and play. And if you can’t, you can play against the pogo computer!

As your guest blogger this week, a pogo "regular" and a member who dates back several years with the site, I'll give you the KISS (keep it simple s-----) basics to enter and traverse the site. Don’t be daunted. You’ll be at play and having fun in no time. And while you are having fun, you can also win points, cash, and prizes. How cool is that?

"Stay tuned" for Part II of Barbara's Guest Blog! She'll give you step by step instructions about how to use Pogo's web site and will demystify playing games online.

 

Happy New Year: Goodreads.com --For Boomer Readers

My gift to you this holiday season is more information about a web site I can't live without. I think most Boomers--especially Boomer readers--- will find Goodreads.com easy to use and full of great information.

I've been a member of Goodreads for a while, ever since one of my relatives suggested it to me. This is a website for inveterate readers, but you have to take some time to make good use of it.  On this site, you post the books you've recently read and rate them, using an easy to use five star system.Users can publish a review of a book if they want, but this is not required.

Users don't have to write out lengthy book info to find books, because they can search by author, title and other key words. The search box is easy to find and use. There are several tabs on the Home Page.  If you hit the My Books tab, you will go to your book list.  Using the green Add Books tab  you can search for any book you want to list.

Another tab lets you search for any books you want to read. For example, I wanted to see all the books that Lee Child wrote since I am headed on vacation and needed a light, exciting read. I entered his name and all his books popped up.

You can look at books your friends have entered, and you can use these for recommendations. I've been absolutely delighted with this service. I found I have a cousin with similar taste to mine in books. I wind up getting what she reads, and I hope I give her some good tips too!

The site solves a problem for me: so many books, so little time. I want to hone in on books I'll enjoy when I have time to read. My mother was a fanatic reader who would bring home stacks of ten books at a time from the library. She would go to the library and browse to her heart's content, and she found her books through trial and error. I go to school, have an empty nest that gets filled with young adults sometimes, write this blog, volunteer, and spend many hours researching this blog. I don't have time for trial and error. I read the New York Times Book Review. And I  go to Goodreads at any time of the day or night and search for books. I can order them online, or if I can wait, I'll make a list for the library. Either way, it's a great resource for me.

Goodreads is an excellent place for Boomers to explore books and authors. When you hit the Explore tab, you are given a list to explore. I hit the Books section and came to a group of lists on which site users had voted. I lost myself in the list of Books Everyone Should Read at Least Once.  Then I looked at the Best Books of the Decade list. Soon I was clicking off and rating as many of these books as I had already read, and I was making a note of the ones I hadn't read for future reading. If you hit the Authors button you will come to great interviews with authors and other reading material about the authors of books. Fledgling writers publish their own stories and chapters on Goodreads, and that's another interesting section.

While writing this post, I found another use for the site. I will now begin to use it to keep track of all the light reading I do on vacation. I think I've read every single Kellerman (both husband and wife) book out there, but maybe I haven't. If I begin listing them and keeping track of them, maybe I'll figure out which ones I haven't read! Stay tuned. 

I hope I've given my Boomer readers some inkling of why I enjoy this web site, and I hope you'll give it a try. I have no connection with Goodreads in any way. I just love to read.

Here's a list of some other web sites for readers. Maybe you'll like these better.

This will be my final post before heading on vacation. I'll be back the week of January 11th. I promise not to post from the beach!

Facebook Privacy--What it means for Boomers

Facebook changed its privacy policy this week, and basically reset everyone's privacy settings so that everyone can see everything you post. And Friends of Friends can see your photos.  If you click here, you will be sent to an excellent blog post by Brian Krebbs at the Washington Post that explains exactly what Facebook did. (Warning: you  may have to close an ad before you can be linked to the blog. It's annoying but worth it.) 

I don't intend to go over the same material Krebbs covered in this blog post. I only want to warn my fellow Boomers, especially the ones who are only occasional users of Facebook, to get in there and check your privacy settings immediately. I think that Boomers have an expectation of privacy that the younger generations who have grown up with social networking don't share. Yet, we have to expect that everything we put on the web will be fodder for some search engine sometime in the future, unless we protect it.

Do you really want Google or Bing pulling up posts you made to update your status? Take something innocent, like a post about a sick member of the family. Once that post is available to be indexed by Bing or Google, it is on the web for posterity, my friends. Your birthday is another example. If you let Facebook make this information public, then you are inviting marketers into your life. This blog article by Kaila Colbin shows how Facebook's decision to pull the privacy rug out from under its users is motivated by the the ability to sell the information it is collecting on us. I understand there are many ways that marketers can get this information anyway, but why make it easy to be a target for them?  The only way to protect your information is to make sure you keep your privacy settings updated.

Like many of my Boomer friends, I use Facebook to keep up with family and friends. I'm not interested in cultivating a vast number of friends of friends. And I am angry with Facebook for resetting my privacy settings --really without much notice. Frankly, I think they should have used my old settings as the default, and asked me to opt in to their new settings, which I would have refused.

Also, there should have been more notice given. While there was a big banner telling me to update my settings when I signed on last week, the keepers of the Facebook community didn't email me, and believe me, they have my email address. We all should have been warned before they made this huge change.

Turning in My Kindle

As I discussed in previous posts, I was privileged to be given a Kindle e-book reader by Pace University as part of a beta test of this device for use by graduate students. At the end of the semester, I was given the opportunity to buy my Kindle for less than half price. I've chosen not to buy it. In this post I want to examine my reasons why.

I was disappointed with the Kindle. Certainly, the device held three rather bulky text books in a small space, no bigger than a notebook, and that was a good thing. I was able to adjust the type size, a boon for a boomer who doesn't like to wear her glasses to read. (I'm talking about me!) And I could search for different topics in each book, something that came in handy in an educational setting. In addition, I liked that all versions of the book could be synchronized, whether I was reading the book on my Kindle, PC or iPhone.  However, the Kindle left much to be desired. I may buy an e-book reader in the future, but I think I'll hold out for one made by Apple. Most of my problems with the Kindle had to do with navigation (the book equivalent of flipping pages), and I think that's one area that Apple gets right.

The litany of things I didn't like about the Kindle is long. First, I didn't like that it doesn't have page numbers, only locations, and that there is no quick and easy way to see where you are within a chapter. Second, I was really unhappy with the little joy stick navigation device.  If you are in a book's table of contents and want to go to Chapter 3, you have to use this joy stick to point to the chapter you want to go to and then click it. The button is hard to use and maneuver. In the same vein, I didn't like the little keyboard and wound up using it as little as possible. Third, I didn't like the Sprint network Kindle used to download the books. I have no Sprint coverage in my house. I had to take my Kindle for a ride out in the car for it to download the books I ordered. Forth, well you get the idea...I don't think I need to beat up on Kindle. For some people, this device might be just what they needed, and I hope they enjoy it.

I'm just looking for something else. If I buy a e-book reader, I want it to mimic the way I use books and add some features I didn't know I needed but like. I want to flip through the pages with a flick of my finger. I want to be able to tell that I'm half way through a chapter easily. I want to be able to bring the e-book reader to the beach without worrying about it getting full of sand, gumming  up the electronics. I want to underline passages if I want, with little effort, and make notes easily, maybe even in hand writing.

I worry about the price point of my ideal device. After all Amazon was willing to let me have my beta tested Kindle for only $200. I won't spend $1000 on an e-book reader and that is the rumored price of Apple's new offering. It may be a while till I have access to a reader again, but I'll be keeping up with developments in this area. I think boomers are a great market for e-book readers, so when the companies finally get them right, we'll all benefit.

Boomers' Attitudes Toward Technology

I saw this great article about Boomer attitudes toward technology  by  Michael Rogers on the AARP web site. Yes, I want to scream when I think of being old enough to benefit from AARP's wisdom, but here I am.

Rogers concludes what I knew all along. Boomers' "technology habits are not frozen in time. Boomers are thoughtful adopters who are open to new technologies that add value to their lives." We don't see ourselves as slow at adopting technology. However, we do think that manufacturers produce products that are excessively complex and have poor instructions.

AARP found that our generation is interested in some very cutting edge technologies.

• We would be willing to wear sensor-equipped exercise clothes, for example, to keep track of our physical condition and calories burned during workouts.

• We are willing to have our health records encoded electronically and maybe even to have a chip implanted with our health history. 

•  Boomers support online banking and are willing to see the mobile phone become both a credit card and cash equivalent.

• Our generation will also adopt "green" technologies en mass.

To be clear, these conclusions were not drawn from a large sample. Only 60 plus "influencers" participated in gatherings during May 2009 in San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago, and New York. All of the participants had broadband Internet at home and so may have represented forward thinkers anyway. Here is the link to the report Boomers and Technology: an extended conversation. 

One example in the report said that Boomers will demand better security online and will pioneer the idea of true online Internet IDs, the electronic equivalent of driver's licenses or passports.  I have great faith in the power of our generation not only to adopt new technologies, but to help influence them. And so I ask you, readers, do you think Boomers will continue to influence technology? Or will it pass them by?