Intel Chairman Craig Barrett is using his golden years to become an evangelist for technology to help senior citizens, leading his company to a prominent role in a small but growing field tackling the needs of an aging nation.
Barrett, 66, gave a keynote address Monday at the once-a-decade White House Conference on Aging in Washington, one of several high-profile roles he has taken recently involving health care technology. He called on the federal government to provide more research money and reduce regulations for new medical technologies to help older people receive better care and remain independent longer.
« We have to do something different. The current method is not sustainable, » Barrett said of the rapidly rising cost of U.S. health care. « And if you have to do something different then you have to think differently, and what we’re suggesting is you can think differently by using technology in an entirely different way. »
Barrett and Intel have tried to do that, helping form the Center for Aging Services Technology, a consortium of 400 companies, universities, associations and long-term care providers. In a sprawling exhibit at the conference in a Washington hotel Monday, the group displayed 50 prototypes and early-stage products — from a robotic assistant called « Nursebot » to an interactive, Web-enabled medicine cabinet.
Some of the technology is expensive. It costs about $4,500 to outfit a home with wireless sensors in one Intel project: A personal computer and the Internet are used to allow doctors and relatives to check on a range of activities by a senior living alone. It tracks such things as whether medications have been taken to how many steps the person has walked since waking up, said Eric Dishman, chair of the Center for Aging Services Technology.
Prices should come down significantly in the future, he said, and those costs would be weighed against the sky-high price of medical care.
« If you look at a condition like Alzheimer’s, keeping somebody in their own home for one to three days could pay for the cost of the technology, » said Dishman, who also heads Intel’s Health Research and Innovation Group.
Barrett has made health research a priority at the company, saying it fits with Intel’s strategy of identifying new ways to use technology.
Barrett is a senior citizen himself, moving from chief executive officer to board chairman earlier this year because of a company policy requiring CEOs to give up their post at 65. But he said his own age has nothing to do with his recent work on technology for the aging, although he joked to the conference’s opening session that he was the oldest of the six keynote speakers. Barrett said he was motivated by experience dealing with the medical needs of an older family member.
« You can look around you and see what happens and see the costs associated with it and see the impact, » Barrett said after leading a large media tour of the conference’s technology exhibit.
Barrett also has been spearheading an effort by high-tech executives to make greater use of information technology in health care, particularly through electronic records. He was appointed in September by Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt to a new public-private commission to set federal standards for exchanging health care data.
Intel’s involvement in the field came as an outgrowth of social science research it did in the United States, South America and Europe beginning in 1999. Although it was designed to look at how people might use entertainment technology, those older than 45 in the project told researchers that their biggest needs were dealing with health care for themselves or older relatives, said Dishman, one of the researchers.
He made a video about the need and started showing it to Intel executives. The company provided seed money for the health research group about three years ago, Dishman said.
The size of the market is hard to quantify, but there are 600 million senior citizens worldwide, a figure expected to double to 1.2 billion over the next 20 years, he said. Most of them are in developed nations, such as the United States, where the first of 78 million baby boomers will turn 65 in 2011.
Unlike today’s elderly, many of those aging Americans are familiar with computers and cell phones, which can be embedded with sensors and other technologies to help with health care needs, Dishman said.
One project by Intel involves what one senior dubbed « caller ID on steroids. » It’s a computer interface for people with growing memory loss that displays not just an incoming caller’s number, but a picture and other information. Intel is expanding a pilot program of technology for Alzheimer’s patients from 24 households to a study of 300 homes over the next five years, Dishman said.
« If you can make these technologies work for frail people who are losing their memory, they’re going to work really well for the rest of us, » Dishman said.
SOURCE: MercuryNews.com
Original text can be found at http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/13395723.htm