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My dad is 85 and this article hits hard about what he fights going on in his body. What sucks is how much of a downward, self reinforcing spiral it all is. It's so hard to see the curbs to walk over or how to get to a thing himself, so he just naturally chooses to do fewer and fewer things. Watching TV is safer and kinder and becomes the default to anything. Which just makes his brain less and less stimulated and active, and you can imagine the drag that adds to keep figuring out life.

But like the empathy found in this article, it's caused me to be incredibly more patient with anyone struggling to walk in front of me on a crowded or narrow sidewalk.

Aging is rough. Thank you to everyone working on accessibility and aging related tech and science.

7 comments

My parents have similar issues due to hearing loss, it really makes any kind of social interaction a chore which results in a similar spiral. For years I've wanted to try to make, or hope someone else would make, a set of AR glasses that's purely focused on providing accurate real-time subtitles, no other gimmicks or features that might affect the wearability/usability. I think that's the biggest QOL boost most old folks would get from a single product, and it seems much more realistically feasible than other potential QOL solutions like robotics, but I wouldn't know where to start with building it. As a bonus, it would just need an LLM/Google Translate hookup to become an amazing travel tool.

Spending R&D in something like this is much more important that building fancier hearing aids. Universal subtitles would be a life changer.

Couldn't you do this with $500 in some Xreal Airs and a mobile phone running Parakeet right now?

Those look bulky, to support exactly the kind of feature creep I think will always be a problem with this category. I think there are a LOT of people who would simply not consider wearing them until the form factor is close to normal glasses, but it would be hard to convince any product manager not to expand into videos/games/music/AI/etc.

What's the feature creep you see them support?

The Xreal front page is people playing racing games and watching movies; I'm imagining something that can be used nonchalantly in public, and I'm assuming every feature beyond a bare minimum speech-to-text display would increase the size.

I've seen R&D demos of universal subtitling and translating, in video conferencing, but it doesn't seem to have taken off or it's hidden behind more paywalls. I did suggest that people use good microphones when giving presentations over MS Teams for the purpose of transcriptions, archiving, searchability and AI summarization, but real time translating would be the other use case.

That said, I don't believe it would work as smoothly if used in AR, as speaking and reading are two different brain things. Plus, if it's aimed at older people, they likely have sight issues too.

To a point this is already possible, just ask people to speak into your phone with e.g. Google Translate or some other text-to-speech engine. But that's awkward, because it's a context switch to a device and the processing time required.

I know my folks already watch movies with subtitles for this reason, and I would think sight issues can be calibrated for if the product is a pair of glasses? But idk how AR tech works with e.g. farsighted people who use reading glasses.

I've never thought of this usecase and I think it's fantastic.

My grandma is 83 and I could’ve written this exact same post.

I know it comes for everyone, but the pace of said spiral is frightening.

Wish we were in a timeframe with more alternatives for rapid loss of mobility and muscle.

While it is challenging, looked at one a life time scale it is kind of a neat thing. It isn't a purely linear decline and that means while the later years kind of suck, you get a lot of decent time before then.

Yes, we should try and work against this but I am just looking at the silver lining.

There's quite a lot of aging research going, maybe will get something concrete in the next 10-20 years (maybe too late for her) but it's at least something

When you stop walking, that's the beginning of the end.

This! My grandmother adopted a dog late in her life. She walked 10km a day with that dog for nearly 20 years! (That dog was the oldest dog I've ever known). At 92 she was famous in my small village, she was in better shape than some of the 30 year olds!

Then the dog died. Instead of walking 10km per day, she lay on the couch staring at the ceiling. About 3 months later she started getting lost on her way to the supermarket. Fifth time she got lost we decided to put her in a home for demented people. We simply couldn't provide the care she needed any other way. Took a few more months and she stopped recognising us.

I think she outlived her dog by about 18 months, iirc.

She stopped walking, and then age came fast for her.

I'm 63. I make a point of walking 5Km (3 miles), every morning. I'm usually out the door, by 0530, and back in about 50 minutes.

I was running, but kept getting injured, so it switched to walking, several years ago.

I think keeping my mind occupied is just as important. It's entirely possible that the visual stimulus of her walks was as important as the exercise.

For myself, I make a point of constantly working on shipping software, and constantly learning new stuff. LLMs have been a godsend, for the latter. I had pretty much given up on trying to ask questions, because of the awful, sneering responses that I was getting, more and more.

Yeah I think you're right! And it's not just the visual stimulus either! She'd walk through pretty much the entire village, including a few homes that smack in the middle of nowhere. And she'd say hello to everyone she passed! Once in a while she'd stop and have chat...

After the dog died she only talked to people if they came into her home.

I think the social aspect of her walks was very important for her health too. Like you say, it's all about exercising that noggin',as well as the body!

I hear you with the running thing. I disliked walking, so I moved somewhere nice and got a dog and that helps tremendously.

I have never been a dog person. Now I want a dog.

A couple of neighbors adopt older dogs. We never discussed that specifically, yet it seems to be a smaller commitment lifetime-wise (few years instead of 10-15 for a young dog), and you'd have to train and deal with a puppy energy (which is a great thing if you have the time and energy to engage in it) if you adopt younger dogs, while the older ones seem to be well set in their good behavior ways. Long walks, established routine, no drama. Also of course fostering is a gateway drug into getting a dog as well as good way to learn what dog would be a match for you.

There's an overwhelming and abundantly clear reason they are referred to as man's best friend. I guess I was fortunate to always grow up with dogs, but I can never really understand people that don't pine for dogs. Now, I can understand not wanting the added responsibility in some situations, but the amazingness of a dog companion is one of the most mind blowing things about the whole nature of human existence. The presence of dogs through evolution legitimately made humans the way they are today and the reverse for what dogs are. It's really wild. I also don't get people that treat their dogs like humans or kids though. It's a dog, don't bring it in a restaurant.

Also lots of empirical evidence that dog owners live longer.

This YouTube video is directly responsible for me getting a dog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocV7Hpj9keM

While the video is very impressive - my main reaction was to think how incredibly cool that type of dog is. So I eventually ended up getting my own Samoyed and it's been a hugely positive impact on my life.

NB I pretty much like all dogs now - but I love Samoyeds.

My grandfather, with whom I was very close, suffered from Parkinson's in his last decade or so. For a long time he was doing OK: Occasional confusion and the slow, shuffling walk that is characteristic of the disease.

One day he had a minor operation that left him needing a wheelchair for what we thought would be just a few weeks. But he never regained his strength and was never to walk again, which led to a steep and sudden decline in his mental condition. It was truly devastating to see one of the sharpest people I knew become an angry and confused simulacrum of the man I so admired.

I wish I had realized two things then: First, as you say, maintaining mobility is the crucial to the well-being of the elderly. Second, immediate physical/occupational therapy after a fall or surgery is essential to people at risk of losing mobility. Sadly it wasn't offered to us and we didn't think to ask.

My dad is going through that shit right now. He fell a few weeks ago and hasn’t walked since.

I live abroad to make more money and feed my ego and I only see him 3–4 times a year. On top of that selfishness, every now and then I catch myself selfishly thinking I don’t want to go through that, which makes me feel like an even worst piece of shit.

Life sucks.

Man, be easy on yourself. You already have the world to put you down, no need to add to it. Life is complicated and I’m sure that you trying to have a better life and a career is not just for ego. Love yourself a bit.

I mean if you are saying you make a lot of money, hire someone to go and get him moving, if he would accept it anyway.

When it comes to physical exercise, this is the key fundamental one. Yes, others things help but it is the foundation on which everything else rests.

Alas, it can be taken away without choice, hopefully not.

Aging should be recognized as a disease already. It's long overdue.

Disease is abnormal to some "norm". When everyone has it, it's not a disease.

I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized to be not having your body rot away over time.

It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable. It strips away your quality of life until there isn't much left and then you die. It doesn't take any more than that for it to be declared a disease.

Whether it's "natural" or whether "everyone has it" is a distraction. If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.

> It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable.

Doesn't make it a disease. Dying is a normal part of life as well as the decline before that.

> If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.

No, then the people not having cancer would have the disease.

> I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized

That's not how a norm works. You get that by doing trials and statistics, not by wanting it to be different.

Starvation used to be "a normal part of life". So was having half your children die before they hit the age of 10. That was the normal, natural outcome of having a child - if you want to have grandchildren, just make more children! Some of them would live, surely!

This is how it was - until humans decided that this sucks and something should be done about that.

I see no reason not to dispose of aging at the earliest opportunity. And this starts by recognizing: aging sucks for everyone, and should be disposed of.

It's not fightable or optional, so it's less like starvation and more like gravity. Humans have decided that we'd like to "dispose" of aging, but unfortunately reality has this annoying habit of not responding to our categorization and despite thinking of it as a disease we cannot fight it like we can other diseases. Those other things you mentioned are considered outside of the usual because we have been able to make them less common through effort; despite all our effort though, aging isn't something we have that control over. We're all gonna die, of old age or a short-sharp-shock, at least until we figure out some wild medical breakthroughs.

Once we have those breakthroughs, sure folks might start thinking of aging as a disease that's not "normal" or a thing that we can actually avoid, but until then it's a fact of life, same as gravity, the sun, or the tides.

I wouldn’t call one of the most essential parts of the life process (moving towards the end of your life involuntarily) a disease.

It’s actually very disturbing how people seem not to be worried about the growing potential for immortality. THAT is a disease, if anything.

If you want to decay and rot and die a miserable death, that's your choice. If your genuine preference is that all of your friends and family and your own children should decay and rot and die a miserable death too, then that's your opinion and you can hold onto it.

But don't you dare force that outcome onto everyone.

In my eyes, "decay and rot and the inevitability of a miserable death is a good thing actually" is a fucking insane viewpoint to hold. The only possible reason I see to hold onto it is that it's the socially accepted cope. If you truly believe that nothing can be done about aging, then "death is good acktually" makes for a good coping mechanism.

I'd rather humans cope less and problem-solve more.

All living beings have protective mechanism against all the degenerative effects of aging, and this has been true for over a billion years now.

That protective mechanism is reproduction. Your viral infections, bacterial infections, broken bones, bad backs, polluted lungs, corrupted mind, and just general wear and tear, does not get transmitted. It's a clean start in life.

There is epigenetic age reset that happens during the conception that "resets" the cells to their young version like kind of a factory reset that cleans up the aging marks and other offsets that have happened during life so they don't get transmitted to the offspring. Learning to apply this process to the living human is quite big research topic. Obviously nature had to figure some kind of mechanism how to not transmit the cellural damage forward.

And the "protective mechanism" humans have against dementia is that they eventually stop being capable of feeding themselves and die.

Which does get rid of dementia alright. But I fail to see that as an acceptable solution.

Aging is part of a natural process we are already able to slow down significantly. Calling it a disease just muddies the semantic space of pathology in my opinion.

Everybody understands already that slowing down or stopping the aging process is desirable. I don't see the usefulness in lumping it in with muscle atrophy, clogged arteries, or cancer.

I don't know, muscle atrophy, cancer etc. are all mostly caused by aging. The current paradigm is kind of whack a mole which won't take us very far.

We need to understand the aging better still like what is actually going on and what are the main drivers (even here is dispute among scientists)

You're saying this as if there were no research going on about aging. We know why aging happens. That doesn't mean we can just stop or reverse the process, or that it is even possible to do so.

One of the technologies I look forward to is exoskeleton. Yes I know it will be used by the army. But the potential to improve elders' lives is huge.

Agreed. But the pessimist in me fears that some people might fall back to that much too soon instead of adopting healthier lifestyles.

Why would it be used by the army? Seems like you don’t need the squishy meat filling for that use case.

There are lots of instances where a soldier being 5-6 times stronger would be really useful.

I don’t think it’ll be a scenario like the starship troopers book, but having one available to a swat team or whatever, could be useful.

Still, I personally think the army would be one of the last applications, because that’s where you need the absolute lowest possible latency. Latency on a suit for an elderly person would be much more acceptable.

Or maybe the scenario where they lift a truck that is stuck in the sand.

An exhaust air bag jack and a plank or five squaddies can already do that job.

Beyond the obvious (medical care, accessibility, etc), I think technology has a huge amount of untapped potential to make the end of our lives a lot more bearable, and a lot less lonely. TV is one thing - and whether it's a net good or not has been discussed to death, so I won't here - but I wonder how video games might be used. They're a lot more engaging - both generally and cognitively - than TV, you can build and achieve things and feel a sense of accomplishment (yeah yeah pride and accomplishment), there are communities around them, you can play with your family, etc. Even online board and card games would be an option. Have you ever considered showing your dad some simple games?

Can’t speak to the cognitive benefits of video games in late life, but my grandma really took to our N64 one summer when my brother and I stayed with her.

She used to stay absorbed in a little battery powered draw poker game that she had, but by the end of the summer she had gone through a large part of our game collection and could put up a real challenge in Mario Kart 64.

Eventually we gifted it to her and she played it for years after that.

Aging is rough. I feel for you. My parents are a bit younger but I'm starting to pick up on things that make me realize they're getting older. Thanks for sharing