In about 5 years the baby boomers will have all hit retirement age. With social security and Medicare there will likely be a significant amount spent on healthcare taking care of this generation.
Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
11–20 of 142 posts
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#12Yep. Spend an hour with an elderly person trying to do things like change a password, unsub from a mailing list, connect a Roku, look at a digital photo album, etc. Will blow your mind wide open. We basically need an entire tier of easy internet for the elderly.
Holy cow, yes.
I just spent an hour yesterday untangling my in-laws shared, paid, Spotify account.
What had transpired is that they needed to confirm FILs physical address. So they sent him a link to an old email address, but no notification in app. He, reasonably didn’t see it within the 1 week deadline. So they removed him from his own shared account. Once he was removed there was no way to confirm his address and self service to get himself back into his own paid service.
To get back on the account I had to find the very hidden “contact a real person” link buried very deep in useless help articles, and gated behind a bot that didn’t even get close to understanding the issue. Then, to verify identity he had us login via the app, not the website, create a playlist, make it private using a secondary menu and message him the name. Only then was he able to be added back onto the shared account. The shared account that he was paying for, mind you.
I have no idea how anyone who hasn’t seen the inside of a tech company is supposed to navigate these systems.
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#13> or wiping his butt Slightly weird take: bidets have this field fully covered and the only thing stopping them from being widely used (especially in this domain!) is user resistance to an unfamiliar solution to a very personal problem. We don't need new tech for this, we just need a marketing breakthrough.
User resistance only gets harder with older people. They will be set in their ways.
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#14Big barriers to entry: regulation, liability, and reimbursement/payment
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#15Yes - but it is so hard to find persistence and passion for such problems (at least for me).
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#16Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#17Yep. Spend an hour with an elderly person trying to do things like change a password, unsub from a mailing list, connect a Roku, look at a digital photo album, etc. Will blow your mind wide open. We basically need an entire tier of easy internet for the elderly.
Wouldn’t tech illiteracy eventually die out? Millenials are good with tech and gen z even better. It’s probably still a good niche for the next 20 years. On the other hand poor fitness and mental wellbeing seems affects all age groups.
Tech illiteracy will only die out if technology finally plateaus. The elderly were great with the technology that was popular when they were in their forties too, the problem is that technology didn't stand still from there.
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#18Yep. Spend an hour with an elderly person trying to do things like change a password, unsub from a mailing list, connect a Roku, look at a digital photo album, etc. Will blow your mind wide open. We basically need an entire tier of easy internet for the elderly.
Wouldn’t tech illiteracy eventually die out? Millenials are good with tech and gen z even better. It’s probably still a good niche for the next 20 years. On the other hand poor fitness and mental wellbeing seems affects all age groups.
Tech literacy seems to be dropping with newer generations.
I taught a basic after school coding class, and the first thing I had to teach was the concept of a file, a folder, saving and loading.
These are things that everyone I went to school with understood in primary school.
Apps have abstracted it all away, and now kids just go for the search bar.
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
#19Agree. Simple stuff that people really need is missing. I mean really simple. I can't read product labels even with serious myopia and a magnifying lens. Only Trader Joe's makes readable shelf signage. Use-by dates take 30 seconds to even find. And there are tons more things. I made a list ... It's getting longer. Thanks for posting this.
A program that parses an arbitrary shelf label and then displays a large-print normalized representation (like the nutrition label) would be valuable.
that is an awesome idea.
Re: Tell HN: your next idea should focus on aged care
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