In Caremerge’s first Trailblazers in Senior Living installment, Asif Khan, Caremerge Founder/CEO and Andrew Smith, Brookdale’s Director of Strategy & Innovation discuss Technology’s Impact on Generational Relationships.
Today’s featured question is: Five to 10 years from now, how do you see technology impacting our generations of the future
You can also watch the interview in its entirety.
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You can also read the transcript below.
Asif Khan: The last question: Five to 10 years from now, how do you see technology impacting our generations of the future?
Andrew Smith: Five to 10 years? Yeah because there’s a lot that’s going to happen in the next five to 10 years, I guess. I think for our industry I think we’re going to see significant increase in expectations of our residents around technology. Today, like I said, we’re generally meeting or exceeding their expectations, but I see that significantly increasing and I’m optimistic and hopeful that we will get the infrastructure in place and the processes in place and meet our associates and family members’ expectations so that then we can move onto our residents as their expectations grow.
I also am really excited and this is maybe societal more than it is our industry, but I think it’ll benefit our industry. I think aging is going mainstream. The Boomers are going to drive that even more than anything. Every institution the Boomers have experienced in their life they’ve transformed completely and I think the Boomers are still I think in their early 70’s are the oldest Boomers.
So this may be more like a 10 to 15-year outlook, but the number of seniors in our society is skyrocketing.
With that, I think we are starting to bring seniors out of the shadows and start to honor and appreciate them more.
One example of that is this Steve Harvey. You know the comedian Steve Harvey guy. He has a show that’s about kids that is a talent show. Now he has one called “Forever Young,” and it’s seniors doing talent.
Andrew Smith: You’ve never seen a senior talent show on a national network before and while I’m excited that we’re bringing seniors out into the light, I think that is an example of how we still have this obsession with youth and we get excited when seniors do things that we think are youthful because it makes us feel good that like, “Oh, you can still hop on a pogo stick when you’re 85. Look at this 85 year old that just ran a marathon.”
It’s like we hold that up as so special, but you also see some early signs of honoring seniors in a way that’s not so focused on youth. You get shows like I think “Grace and Frankie” on Netflix or if you haven’t seen “Robot and Frank,” which is like an Indie film about a man who befriends a caregiving robot in the near future, highly recommend it.
For anybody Interested in seniors, very just powerful commentary on what it means to age and lose your memory and family relations but, anyway, I think I use these entertainment examples to make the point that I think aging is going mainstream.
I’m excited for what that means for our industry. It’s going to shine a light on it so we’ve got to be ready, but I think it’s going to be really good.
Asif Khan: There are more and more content about what seniors are doing and it’s not like the silent generation where you just kind of go away.
They are very loud and they’re living their life to the fullest and, actually, that is very inspirational. Whenever I see somebody running a marathon, I was like, “Boy, if this person can do it, why am I stopping running?” For example, right? If some people think about, “Oh, I can’t do this or that.” It’s just very inspirational.
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