It’s good to see how tablets are helping the elderly improve the quality of their lives. 

If you follow ATDI’s Twitter feed – go on, admit it; you know you do – you’ll see the mention we made of how iPads, Samsung’s and such are being used by older people so that they can live in their own homes and under their own steam for longer.

I have a neighbour who, in her 90s, is pretty much housebound. But, because of her webcams, she is in pretty much constant contact with her family. And because half of her family is here and the other half is in New Zealand, whenever she wants to chat, there is somebody around to do so. It is warming to watch her say hello to folks on the other side of the world and talk to them as if they were in the same room. Bless her for embracing the benefits of technology.

What this also means is that, through the several webcams she has mounted around her flat and the varying time zones in which her kin live, her family can monitor her wellbeing 24-hours a day.

And you know who are heroes in all this, apart from her vigilant and diligent family? Us.
We are the industry that makes all this possible. Without our expertise, the wifi wouldn’t work, the international connections wouldn’t be linking anything and her mobile phone would be just so much metal and plastic.

And nobody knows we exist. These services are now so ubiquitous that folks barely notice they are there – and they notice even less the people who provided them.

We’re in good company, though. Nobody ever said thank you to Clark Kent.

Jeff Clark Meads