For older adults, drivers of tech change 2025 and beyond

The more things change – some trends dominate.   As the demographics change, couples age at different rates, life expectancy grows among the 65+ --averaging 20 more years, the oldest population growth rate outpaces younger demographic segments.  As the oldest baby boomer crosses 80 in the next few months several trends will drive technology adoption in distinctly new ways. As a result, the market for tech will need to accommodate a series of changes, sales methodologies and market opportunities.  A worsening labor shortage will continue to plague the senior care sectors, including senior living, nursing homes, and in-home care. What are the drivers that should attract innovators in the older adult tech industry?

More older adults are in the work force. They need to cope with cost of living increases across multiple categories. Today, more than 11 million adults aged 65+ are in the workforce – of these, 2 million are aged 75+, growing to 3.3 million by 2033. A growing number of mostly online training programs are offered in multiple job categories to help older adults gain needed skills. Meanwhile, AI is now integral to job seeking and recruiting systems. 

As senior living occupancy approaches 90 percent, all will be greeted by tech. Companies are already deploying chatbots for multiple aspects of senior living processes, including marketing/sales, daily check-ins, AI-enabled systems for remote monitoring, wellness tracking and daily work processes.  While people are a critical dimension of all of these processes, AI tools will help make the processes more efficient and the workers more effective, especially when there are fewer workers during off-hours and weekends. As senior living costs and prices rise, more tools will emerge to help consumers predict needs and better manage the costs. Health and wellness tools as well as chronic disease management tech will be adopted to help communities manage a frailer population.  Home health care services are increasingly adopting technologies to optimize work.

Check-in technologies will become suites of tech services.  In both senior living and home care, companies are increasingly deploying daily check-in technologies.  Moving forward these check-in tools will morph into initiating service requests for both senior living and home care – including queries about what is needed that can be delivered? As voice-technologies become smarter about tone, it is feasible that these tools will recognize depression and help with mitigating the social isolation of the oldest. ChatGPT has been studied as a way to address social isolation among those with mild cognitive impairment.  And its 4.0 version can recognize phrases in conversation that indicates the speaker is lonely.