Gerontology Program

Richard Adler is a Senior Analyst with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA. Among his major concerns is how technology and business will interact over the next three decades, as Boomers enter into and move through middle age into older age. Adler forecasts how new technologies affect work life and daily life, and he envisions innovative opportunities. Certainly both the content and cost of health care will be changed by computers, boomers, and an increasingly technology-literate society.
www.iftf.org

Dennis Quaintance is President of Quaintance-Weaver Hotels and Restaurants, and Chief Designer of one of the “greenest” new hotels in the United States, the Proximity Hotel in Greensboro. Named after the Proximity Cotton Mill, a major denim production facility in Greensboro, externally the hotel recreates the mill, but internally is high-tech and environmentally “green” in terms of its use of recycled building materials, solar heating, water conservation mechanics, and geothermal heating. Consider how "green" technologies may command the attention of boomer's residential and travel expectations. www.proximityhotel.com/green.htm

Brian Jones is director of the Aware Home Research Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. This “smart house” offers a residential laboratory for a broad range of physical and social scientists to test interactions among older persons and technology. By examining both available and developing technologies, Aware Home researchers are evaluating how technology can be used to keep older people independent longer – from entertainment through robotics.
http://awarehome.imtc.gatech.edu/