With all of us boomers getting older, it's good to know that MIT has an AgeLab to develop new ideas to improve the quality of life for older folk and those that care for them.
Technology and nurses will be our best hopes for aging well because there will not be enough geriatricians for us; there's not enough now as I wrote in "Nothing, It's Too Late."
Selected by the Wall St. Journal as one of the 12 People Who Are Changing Your Retirement, Joseph Coughlin describes his work as "trying to get people to 'age cool'."
he is pushing advances in transportation, health care and housing off drawing boards and into older adults' lives.
And he can't do it quickly enough.
"If we don't hurry," he says, "the products being designed now aren't going to be there when the [baby] boomers need them."
In a piece by David Ho, MIT AgeLab Preparing for an Older Tomorrow, Coughlin is quoted
"Our greatest success is now our greatest challenge," Coughlin says. "Where are you going to live? How are you going to get around? What are you going do in those 10, 20, 30, 40 years of extra time?"
So he founded AgeLab
to unravel a paradox: Humanity in the last century achieved the dream of much longer life, but didn't plan for the effects on work, health and daily living.
One of its projects is a partnership with the Business Innovation Factory and the Tockwotton Nursing Home in Rhode Island to creating a real-world laboratory for improving elderly care by developing and testing new solutions, products and models