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Accessible transportation is essential for successful aging, because quality of life cannot be sustained unless older adults have reliable and affordable access to social, medical, and other essential services. This is why Dial-A-Ride is vital to many older adults and why my research team created a prototype mobile app for Dial-A-Ride users.

There is another serious epidemic silently spreading in America: senior invisibility.  Nearly everyone except for essential workers experienced “early retirement” from everyday activities, at least for a while, when stay-at-home orders went into effect across the country.

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Driving a car means maintaining independence for many older adults — driving allows you to shop, see friends and family, keep up with medical appointments, and avoid social isolation. But sometimes staying safe behind the wheel as you age can be a challenge.

The presidential contest is fully underway, and many of the candidates fit the definition of “older adults,” those age 65+ years.  In the past I’ve been queried about candidates for high office (such as former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien) who are of pensionable age.  Usually the concerns of the journalist are not that the candidate might die in office, but rather that they may become demented and whether we should have either an age limit on candidates or some form of fitness testing.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are included in many new vehicles.  They feature such functions as blind-spot detection (sadly, usually only available with a high-end package), forward-collision warning and braking, lane-keeping warning and steering guidance, adaptive cruise control and the now required (in all new 2018 vehicles) backup camera.

 We have so many ways to communicate with each other today that didn’t exist 50 years ago, such as through the Internet and with mobile phones, yet we report greater social isolation and loneliness than ever before.  Research studies suggest that about a quarter of the U.S.

Even though the United States spends more on health care per capita than most other countries, life expectancy is lower than in many other developed countries and varies geographically. There is a huge need to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes, while reducing healthcare costs. Health information technology is the key to make this happen.

The term “Wicked Problems” arose in the 1970s to distinguish major challenges of public policy from those of the hard sciences. Most famously articulated in a 1973 paper by Rittel and Webber in Policy Sciences, Wicked Problems are issues that are very difficult, if not impossible, to solve because they are 1) highly complex, with no readily apparent solution, 2) intricately interconnected with other problems, 3) entrenched in the landscape and/or the political arena, and 4) volatile, presenting constantly moving targets to policy makers. These problems defy conventional solutions because the typical set of policy responses are insufficient to address these problems in any meaningful way.

Clinical trials are conducted for testing the efficacy and safety of a treatment (e.g., medication, device, procedure) for one or more medical conditions. However, older adults are systematically underrepresented in clinical trials, and this creates serious repercussions in the health-care industry.