Startup Taps Emotional Benefits of Technology for Seniors

Between on-demand services, wearables, and other disruptive technology, senior care is set to be revolutionized in the years ahead as tech companies line up to serve the ever-increasing aging population. One startup is taking its own approach by tapping the psychological and emotional benefits that technology bears for seniors.

The History Project, a digital storytelling platform, provides an intuitive outlet to capture personal and family histories in a collaborative, interactive timeline format. Users can bring together memories and artifacts scattered across digital, social and physical worlds for users of all ages to create life narratives through voice recordings, snapshots of meaningful events and video clips. What’s more, it has garnered attention and $2.1 million in funding from the likes of the Associated Press, The New York Times and venture capitalists.

The platform is being rolled out in pilot projects in a handful of senior living communities, including Mary’s Woods, a single-site continuing care retirement community (CCRC) located in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and Carlsbad By The Sea Retirement Community, a beachfront CCRC located in Carlsbad, California and operated by Front Porch, a senior living provider that manages and operates 11 full-service retirement communities primarily in Southern California.

The goal—to explore how reflection and storytelling impact the seniors involved in the programs and assess The History Project’s lasting effects.

“In an age where more and more technology is coming into play in the lives of seniors, a lot of it is very functional, but there’s also something to be said about the psycho-social and emotional side,” Niles Lichtenstein, CEO and Founder of The History Project, tells Senior Housing News. “That’s a lot of what our focus has been—what are those psycho-social benefits of life story reflection and legacy preservation? How does it also create intergenerational conversation and engagement? How do we make technology feel not like distance or alienation but enablement and empowerment?”

Read the full article from Senior Housing News.