Planning for a wave of active Baby Boomers, MIT's AgeLab designs for the needs of tomorrow's elderly.

By Ken Shulman
December 2001

This personal shopping assistant supplies older shoppers with nutritional and savings information and encourages them to try new healthy foods and recipes.


The people at MIT's AgeLab aren't at all interested in designing a better wheelchair. Gui Trotti and Dava Newman, for example, have spent most of their careers thinking about extreme environments. Trotti, an architect and industrial designer, charts the slings and arrows suffered by the human body aboard submarines, in the desert, on offshore oil rigs, and in space. Newman, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies the biological effects of microgravity on astronauts, and designs garments that will keep these astronauts functioning and healthy on future long-term missions.

Why, then, have these two channeled their expertise toward designing homes, workplaces, clothes, and lifestyle strategies for the "actively aging"--the cadre of baby boomers now testing the limits of their 50s--as well as for the elderly? "Aging is an extreme environment too," says Trotti, a 50-year-old Argentine who, along with Newman, has recently applied skills acquired in four decades of extreme design into AgeLab, a two-year-old multidisciplinary research-and-design shop at MIT. "An older person doesn't have the flexibility or strength of a younger person. In designing for that, you have to be extremely considerate about his needs. You can't design with your ego. You have to design with your mind focused on the end user. It's like designing for a boat or spaceship, where everything has a place and every place has a thing."

Offsite:
MIT's AgeLab Web site, http://web.mit.edu/agelab, documents its mission and research and offers links to a wealth of related sources. MIT also offers a timeline of transportation studies from 1973 to the present, including Joe Coughlin's work, at http://web.mit.edu/cts/www/research-timeline.htm. Illustrations by House Industries for Metropolis.
Newman, who is currently reinventing the space suit for future NASA missions, looks at space not only as a complex engineering problem but also as a laboratory where the normal processes of aging are accelerated tenfold. "In three months aboard the space station, we see up to 30 percent muscle atrophy and 40 percent muscle-strength loss," she says. "An astronaut loses between one and two percent bone mineral and bone-marrow density each month. These are deteriorations that normally take decades here on Earth. Space work is wonderful and fascinating. And we might actually send humans to Mars by 2014. But between now and then there are a lot of people my work could benefit here on Earth."

Initially conceived to assist those with hearing loss, the phone accepts written (using a pen instead of a keyboard), verbal, and audio input.


Part think tank, part venture-capital group, and part design project, AgeLab is the brainchild of Joseph Coughlin, an MIT faculty member with a background in transportation and public policy. The collaborative project involves engineers, social scientists, architects, designers, consumer specialists, graduate students, and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Six commercial partners underwrite the project: Procter & Gamble, the Hartford, AARP, AARP Services Inc., Philips Medical Systems, and EDS. Each of the six has contributed $1 million to AgeLab in exchange for intellectual property rights to specific products or services that the laboratory may invent.

Although AgeLab is geared toward inventing products and programs--and not doctoral dissertations--Coughlin and his colleagues maintain that their research will not be tainted by sponsorship. "There's obviously an entrepreneurial element here," says AgeLab's Masha Maltz, who earned her PhD in Human Factors Engineering at Israel's Ben-Gurion University. "Research needs funding. It also needs academic freedom--the freedom to run an experiment and get whatever result you get, not to tailor it to the company that's paying. We're very committed to academic freedom. If our research then leads to something that can be marketed, that's wonderful."

Trotti is working on plans for a modular house that would allow for easy substitution of appliances, cabinets, and fixtures, permitting seniors to adapt their existing homes to their evolving physical needs instead of having to move to new dwellings. "People talk about the house of the future, or a house for the elderly," Trotti says. "My concept is a house that is flexible, particularly in the kitchen and bathrooms. A good-looking house, a place you're not embarrassed to show, but that you can also live in and move through with ease."

Seniors will look more like Olympic track stars than the physically disabled while wearing this suit that aids in walking and protects fragile areas like hips and knees.


Newman is working on a biosuit for seniors that would improve circulation, control temperature, and protect fragile areas like hips and knees during falls. The suit would also simulate the effects of leg and hip muscle groups, helping the elderly to stand and walk. "Now that everyone has seen the sleek track suits the athletes wore at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, I think seniors might enjoy wearing something like this," Newman says. "They'd certainly like it more than the standard aluminum walker, which is an insult to engineering."

AgeLab specialists are examining existing practices in health care, transportation, technology, ergonomics, housing, communications, and recreation, and trying to project for the needs of tomorrow's elderly. Maltz has started research aimed toward adapting or redesigning computer software interfaces for the specifications of an older user. She also charts the efficacy of laser-based distance alarms in preventing front to rear-end automobile collisions and the effect of these alarms on driving habits. In a studio course AgeLab sponsored and supervised at RISD last spring, students hatched plans for a personalized high-tech shopping assistant, a portable telephone with a ballpoint pen interface in lieu of a keyboard, a sophisticated but user-friendly front-door security system, and a squishy Pill Pet that provides companionship--and timely pharmaceutical reminders--to isolated and sometimes forgetful seniors.

But more than a factory for gadgets or garments that might appeal to the estimated 77 million baby boomers heading toward old age, AgeLab should inspire designers, manufacturers, marketers, and consumers to look at aging as something other than an inevitable decline. Coughlin sees it as a laboratory where he and his collaborators help divine a new lifestyle for the world's increasingly aging--but resiliently active--population. It's an impetus that Coughlin says is sorely needed if our society is to overcome its own denial--and in some cases revulsion--about growing old.

"Everyone talks about aging being a hot topic, and a hot market," says Coughlin, who recently opted for a pair of "sensible" shoes instead of stylish wing tips to pamper his creaky 40-year-old knees. "But at the bottom line, a lot of us are fearful of aging. We see it as the step right before death. We see it as a depressing topic, with not much we can do. Part of what we have to do here is be a global-agenda center--not just on the technical and business processes but also to change the definition of aging, to show that this is an opportunity and not a downhill slide."

This computerized furry companion displays health reminders on a screen in its belly. The relationship is not one-sided: owners must give the "pet" feedback or it simulates death.


Depending on which survey you consult, the number of Americans over 65 years old will balloon from the current 33 million to nearly 90 million over the next four decades. Every seven seconds a baby boomer somewhere celebrates his 50th birthday. And the graying of our species is hardly limited to the United States: nearly 30 percent of Europe will be over 60 by year 2025, along with 43 percent of the former Soviet Union. China will soon have a senior population greater than the total population of Germany. Coughlin, who came to MIT in 1997, created AgeLab as a response to what he defines as one of the central paradoxes of our times. "One of the greatest human achievements of the last hundred years is adding thirty to forty years to our lifespans," Coughlin says. "But here's the problem. Now that advances in medical science, engineering, nutrition, sanitation, and physical fitness have extended our lives, we as a society have not even begun to think about how those extra decades will be lived. The things we do here, at MIT and other universities, have contributed to increased longevity. And I think we have a responsibility to those people whose lives we've extended."

When Coughlin first proposed the AgeLab project two years after he came to MIT's Center for Transportation Studies in 1997, he wasn't merely responding to America's changing demographics. He was responding to the change in how the aging are defined, and how they define themselves. Older Americans today are more active, better educated, and far wealthier than any analogous group in the past. At present 77 percent of all disposable income in the United States is controlled by people 50 years or over. MIT economist Lester Thurow expects America's baby boomers to inherit more than $14 trillion in assets, making this legacy the largest transfer of wealth in history. In addition, Coughlin believes that as baby boomers enter into their seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of life, they will continue to expect the same preferential treatment from marketers that they have received throughout their lives.

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