Across the United States, the older adult population is growing faster than ever, while becoming rapidly more diverse – by race, geography, language, country of origin, and beyond.
This demographic shift dovetails with a period of unprecedented innovation, propelled in the 21st century by increasingly sophisticated algorithmic models and the ever more gigantic datasets that fuel them. Such progress provides promising opportunities to reimagine how society can support older adults. In fact, innovative solutions can dramatically enhance the quality of life for older adults, particularly around key social determinants of health, including housing, transportation, and food security.
But left unchecked, the speed at which new technology develops can also exacerbate digital ageism, the lack of diverse representation of older individuals in the design, development, and marketing of digital tools and their algorithms. Without the intentional inclusion of these communities at every step of the design process, new products that are meant to improve the health and wellbeing of these communities can instead lead to direct harms as serious as misdiagnosis of illness and denial of life-saving healthcare coverage.
With both these potential opportunities and serious risks in mind, Aspen Digital wrote the Older Adults & Digital Equity playbook after months of consultations with tech companies, community leaders, policymakers, and more. This playbook is intended as a practical tool for organizations at any level of maturity to understand what steps they can take to improve the lived experiences of millions of older adults, while ensuring their solutions and business models are relevant to more humans than ever.
