What two inventions of recent years have enhanced the lives of older people more than any others?  My answer would be the cell phone and email.

In a short time, wireless telephones have proven themselves socially beneficial. They have improved our safety and security to a remarkable extent. When we are in serious distress, they enable us to summon help immediately. If we have trouble finding the way to our destination when driving, we can call and ask for directions, as friends have done on their way to my house. And they reassure us of people’s wellbeing: While she was her way through the streets of Paris, my daughter would converse animatedly with her mother and me.

Email puts us in touch with grandchildren, if we have them, other family members and friends even when they are scattered throughout the world. It enables us to reach out to people to whom we are unlikely ever to write letters. With precious little effort we can reach to the ends of the earth.

Mind you, I still have some quarrels with these wonders of modern technology. I regard cell phones as often, ironically, anti-social.  You see people walking the streets entirely abstracted from those who are heading toward them. And when you are listening to a concert or even to a sermon in church, someone’s phone rings, jarring you out of your absorption.

And email has led, I fear, to the near demise of personal letter-writing. How many collections of emails have you seen in a bookstore or on anyone’s shelf? Emails may also have damaged the prose style of some writers.

I am also aware of omitting some other good candidates for an MVT Award, for Most Valuable Technology. In the medical field, for example, pacemakers and stents for coronary arteries must be judged marvels of human ingenuity. Uncounted numbers of people are still alive because of them.

I recently proposed my nominations for best recent technology to Joseph Coughlin, the innovative director of MIT’s AgeLab. He readily agreed that email and the cell phone deserve recognition for the value they have added to the lives of many elders.

Though not all older Americans yet have access to these two devices, they have passed Professor Coughlin’s requirements for new products. For him, they must meet the threefold test of acceptability, availability, and affordability. Most people are pleased with email and cell phones and can readily learn how to use them; they are plentiful and can be easily procured; the majority of Americans have enough money to purchase these services.

By contrast, think of the palm pilot, an electronic device that, appearing some ten years ago, promised to help people put their lives in order. In practice, however, it has turned out to be of less value than a notebook in which you can write with a no. 3 lead pencil.

And long-term care health insurance, a different kind of invention, is a product that few of us buy, either because we cannot afford it or because we are not convinced it will provide us enough coverage when we need people to take care of us.

Exercise machines are products that people buy but find they quickly stop using. Many a cellar features such a machine gathering dust in the corner because people find it’s easier to go out for a walk than to get on the contraption. However, precious few of us actually do either.

Technological innovation will surely leave its mark on the lives of older Americans over the next decades as our numbers increase dramatically. Among the possibilities, Dr. Coughlin foresees us gaining access to personalized advice for what he calls “wellness care.” If some 110 million of us out of a total population of 290 million have at least one chronic disease, then the need for easy recourse to medical advice becomes clear.

I find Dr. Coughlin’s concept of technology enticing. He considers technology “an extension of oneself.”  It represents human ingenuity’s success in figuring out ways to increase a person’s reach. Devices we cannot yet imagine will someday enable us to do what now seems impossible or, at least, impractical.

Such inventions will help give shape to Coughlin’s vision of the future. “We need to get rid of retirement as an idea,” he says. Instead, we must develop a more compelling outlook and we need to renegotiate the social contract that rigidly separates schooling, work and retirement. Instead, we should think bigger and let improved technology help us revolutionize our aging society.

That is what the two inventions cited show signs of doing. Email and cell phones enable us to extend the scope of our power of communication far more widely than we could have imagined. I feel glad to have been blessed with enough longevity to see them come into being and to be enabled to make good use of them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Richard Griffin