For the Advanced in Age, Easy-to-Use Technology

IN the 1960s, baby boomers, like most young people, could not wait to leave home.

Today, those boomers are trying to figure out how to stay at home,
even if they are past the age when their parents made the passage to
senior living. Companies that have long profited from the
transformation of the counterculture into the over-the-counter culture
are creating products that they hope will help them do that.

Here
is what you have to look forward to as you enter your 60s and 70s:
deciphering conversations at cocktail parties becomes difficult; you
cannot remember where you put your keys; and your grandchildren think
you are a computer klutz.

Fortunately, technologies are
appearing that can remedy some of these shortcomings, helping those in
their 60s maintain their youthful self-images.

“The new market is old age,” said Joseph F. Coughlin, director of the AgeLab at M.I.T.
“Baby boomers provide a perpetually youthful market.” They are, says
Mr. Coughlin, himself a spry 47, “looking for technology to stay
independent, engaged, well and vital.”