December 17, 2018 – Technology and Aging

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Anchor lead: How can technology help support people to age as well as possible? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Can engineering technologies enable help older people age in place? That’s one hope of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at Johns Hopkins. Gregory Hager, director of the center, highlights one issue addressed at the recent ‘Engineering for an Aging Society’ symposium, utilizing a model that addresses many aspects of aging.

Hager: The question was can we start to take that model and say physical, cognitive and social/emotional, and think of how we could develop support tools, both for an older adult and for the care network that’s actually taking care of that older adult. A great example is falls.  They have a fall, suddenly they go from being at home to being in acute care, and then they’re going to go through a set of transitions as they rehab, move back home. We really have to think of this in a multidimensional way, not just in the immediate event and how to fix the immediate event but the broader individual and how to support that individual.  :32

Hager is confident that engineering solutions can develop tools to help. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.