Health and tech news that’s a snooze–or infuriating

The always acerbic Laurie Orlov has a great article on her Aging in Place Technology Watch that itemizes five news items which discuss the infuriating, the failing, or downright puzzling that affect health and older adults. In the last category, there’s the ongoing US Social Security Administration effort to eliminate paper statements and checks with online and direct deposit only–problematic for many of the oldest adults, disabled and those without reasonable, secure online access–or regular checking accounts. The infuriating is Gmail’s latest ‘upgrade’ to their mobile email that adds three short ‘smart reply’ boxes to the end of nearly every email. Other than sheer laziness and enabling emailing while driving, it’s not needed–and to turn it off, you have to go into your email settings. And for the failing, there’s IBM. There’s the stealth layoff–forcing their estimated 40 percent of remote employees to relocate to brick-and-mortar offices or leave, while they sell remote working software. There’s a falloff in revenue meaning that profits have to be squeezed from a rock. And finally there’s the extraordinarily expensive investment in Watson and Watson Health. This Editor back in February [TTA 3 and 14 Feb] noted the growing misgivings about it, observing that focused AI and simple machine learning are developing quickly and affordably for healthcare diagnostic applications. Watson Health and its massive, slow, and expensive data crunching for healthcare decision support are suitable only for complex diseases and equally massive healthcare organizations–and even they have been displeased, such as MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in February (Forbes). Older adults and technology – the latest news they cannot use