An Aging Population Worldwide

I n 1999, I led a team of Intel social scientists in an anthropological study of 100 households in the US and Europe that had been early adopters of broadband technology. One of the participants in this study was Sheila, a schoolteacher who had been the first person on her block to get high-speed Internet access because she wanted to videoconference with her granddaughter, who lived three time zones away. Even while complaining of the “hideous Ethernet cables” snaking around her living room and the recurrent need to reset the modem, Sheila also described the technology as “nothing less than a miracle for the relationship it has given me with my granddaughter.” Having already given up her much-loved career to care for her own ailing mother, Sheila now faced becoming a caregiver for her husband’s mother as well. She was asking for another technological miracle: