Trends We're Following In 2018

Before the year gets ahead of us, here’s a quick list of initiatives that we’re keeping an eye on at innovAGEING.

1. Augmented reality goes mainstream with live apps that’ll tell you what to do, and be more interactive than how-to-videos, eg, need help navigating the My Aged Care portal, or trying to figure out whether a restaurant is any good… just point your smartphone at it.
2. Voice-driven automated telephony systems become more intuitive, and allow for older members of our community to have natural conversationsregarding health services such as medication reminders, treatment advice, and health management advice to be delivered.
3. Companies providing “quantified-self” technologies and products get savvier with regards to the data that they track and generate. The focus will change from the amount of data generated, to generating and communicating data that is useful and helpful in making health decisions.
4. The increasing interest in the social and ethical impacts of technologies are uncovering potential biases inherent in our systems, eg, job recruitment, loan applications, facial recognition software, and the like. Artificial intelligenceapplications that don’t perpetuate ageist premises would be refreshing.
5. Recombinant growth originated from the economist Martin Weitzman’s theory that knowledge combines and recombines, and increases over time as a result. As such, industry progress is anchored in its ability to process ‘ever-greater numbers of seed ideas into workable innovations’–cue open innovation and crowdsourcing.