The senior-specific products pitched at CES run the gamut from advanced to stripped-down.
Halo Monitoring's MyHalo strap is worn across the sternum and sends data on heart rate, temperature and other vital health functions to a wireless router that caregivers can access over the Web. If the user falls, calls for help automatically go out.
Then there are simple cellphones. Clarity, a Plantronics Inc. subsidiary, has made telephony products for people with hearing loss for about 30 years. When it came to making a cellphone recently, the company found its customers craved louder earpieces, bigger displays and fewer buttons.
The result, Clarity's C900, has four buttons on the front -- for answering or calling, hanging up and scrolling through contacts -- and a slide-out keypad. There's no text messaging or Web surfing. But the phone does include a flashlight and an emergency button that alerts pre-determined contacts.
The Quality of Life Technology Center, a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, is developing products that adapt to their users, including software that senses when a computer user is leaning closer to the screen so it can make the text bigger and navigation systems that learn their users' driving needs, habits and capabilities. The technology center is also developing a kind of backup brain system to help jog memory when the user can't remember the name that goes with a face.
"Technology fills the gap between intent and capability," said Curt Stone, director of the program that's commercializing the center's products.
Though seniors get their own tech summit at CES, products oriented specifically toward them occupy only a small section of the show floor. But the summit's founder said the growth potential could become too seductive to ignore.
"Boomers are going to demand that these things are there -- for themselves and their parents," Raskin said.
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michelle.maltais@latimes.com
