An iPad, a couple of smartphones and a Doro phone with big buttons designed for senior citizens lie on a bookshelf, gathering dust; they haven’t been touched for months. 85-year-old Per lives in a small house in the Norwegian town of Gjøvik, a two-hour-drive north of Oslo. When the doorbell rings, he opens without a smile. He’s not angry, but uninterested; he knows why these young, cheerful people are here – they have come with his daughter Benedicte to install yet another communication device in his home.
Per grew up in a world without smartphones, and even though his children and grandchildren have tried to get him to use one, he’s been very reluctant to learn the technology. But this device is different.
First, Per notices that it looks familiar – like an old TV or traditional radio, just a box with a big knob in the lower right-hand side corner. “You can turn it on and off like so,” explains Karen Dolva, the CEO and co-founder of No Isolation, a Norwegian startup that designed the device, which is called KOMP. Once it’s on, it stays on so that Per’s family can send him pictures they take with their phones, which will automatically appear on the screen. They can call him, too, and the call will simply go through and connect after a ten-second warning – no need to press anything. Of course, if Per doesn’t want any calls or pictures, he can always switch KOMP completely off, simply by turning the easy-to-grasp knob fully to the left, Dolva tells him.
Per mumbles that they can just “shove their thing in the most faraway corner of the room, I won’t use it anyway”. And they do, and leave.
That was a year ago, when No Isolation first launched its first KOMP prototype in Norway. Two days later, Dolva’s phone rang. “Per called us and asked us to come back and move the device into the living room, because he said he was tired of constantly getting up and walking to the screen to look at pictures his grandkids were sending him,” she says.
No Isolation was co-founded by Dolva and her university friends Marius Aabel and Matias Doyle in October 2015. And KOMP is not its first product. In 2016, it launched AV1, a doll-sized robot designed to help house or hospital-bound children who can’t attend school. The children can control AV1 remotely through a tablet, and the bot becomes their avatar through which they can see what’s happening in the classroom and participate.
So far, 160 AV1s have been deployed at more than a hundred UK schools; in total, 850 of the bots are in use worldwide, in 13 countries. With a hefty price tag of £2,200 or £167 per month to rent, it’s usually sold to schools, not parents – and schools tend to rotate the machines once one child gets better and comes back to school. Now, Dolva wants to bring KOMP to the UK market as well.
KOMP is definitely not a phone. But it’s aimed at solving the same issue: how do you keep in touch? Of course there are plenty of older people happy to use technology; Daniel Gleeson, an analyst at digital consultancy Ovum, says that smartphone usage has been growing very rapidly among seniors lately, “driven in large part by more recent retirees most of whom would have used smartphones or the internet over the past 20 years”.
A 2017 Ofcom report shows that the use of technology among older people has indeed been surging recently. “Baby boomers aged 65-74 are increasingly connected, with four in ten (39 per cent) using a smartphone, up 11 percentage points in a year,” say the authors. There has also been a sharp rise in over-75s using tablets, from 15 per cent to 27 per cent, while the use of smartphones among this age group has nearly doubled, from eight per cent to 15 per cent.
That’s impressive, but, says Ian Hosking, a researcher in technology design for the elderly at the University of Cambridge, the Ofcom report masks “the problems faced by those who cannot master mainstream technology”. There are plenty of people who, like Per, are in the older part of the elderly spectrum. According to the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 14,910 people aged 100 and over lived in the UK in 2016, or two for every 10,000 people. As for those aged 90 and over, there were 571,245 of them in the UK in 2016 – the highest number ever.
And another study found that elderly people face very specific barriers when it comes to mobile devices. Apart from cost, the researchers found that vision impairment and lack of knowledge in using various smartphone functionalities are the main obstacles.
Over the past decade or so, a few companies have been trying to address just that – making phones aimed at the older population simpler to use and with more prominent features like big buttons that make a sound when pressed. Among the most well-known ones are Breezie, Emporia and Doro, which make both tablets and smartphones with features aimed at the older generation.
Some have just four buttons with custom names next to them to easily call close friends and family; others have touchscreens but are easier to navigate than a regular smartphone would be. Breezie, for instance, is even selling through large senior-care and health-care providers to both seniors and care providers, and says that its products help the elderly to stay “mentally engaged through tailored and curated apps and content”, according to CEO Jeh Kazimi.
Unlike KOMP, which is a home-only device, these are all mobile. And then there is XPLORA.
This startup, also from Norway, recently launched a watch aimed at the elderly. Founder Sten Kirkbak says that the company first developed a watch for children, with bright colours and a plastic strap; the one for the elderly works similarly but has a leather strap. “I had a very traumatic experience that made me create the watch – I nearly lost my four-year-old son, Filip, at a shopping centre nine years ago,” says Kirkbak. So he decided to design a device that would help parents know where their kids were at all times.
The watch is effectively a phone, but on your wrist. When someone calls, the user can answer it by tapping the screen and speak as if on a speakerphone, with similar quality. It’s possible to store from 12 to 50 numbers, depending on the model, and the wearer can even receive texts – though can only reply with a range of emojis. For seniors, there is also a function to set up alerts to take medicines or measure blood pressure.
“What we learned from our pilot is that in some cases, there is a level of scepticism from seniors towards technology, particularly if usage of a technology is difficult,” says Kirkbak. So whether it is a retro video call screen on the wall, a phone with big buttons, or a watch with emojis, while our world hasn’t been totally taken over by digital natives, companies will continue to innovate to keep our parents safe – and not lonely.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
