• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, February 16, 2021

One of my pandemic projects has been editing a video series of oral history interviews we did with local seniors in my community. Last week, I finished the first video in the series. The original plan, pre-pandemic, was to unveil the video as a special event at a local theater, with the participants attending. Obviously, given our current reality, we had to change our plans.

We, like the rest of the world, moved our event online. As I started working through the logistics of this, I quickly realized something: Our seniors are on the other side of a wide and rapidly growing chasm. Yes, our society is digitally connected in ways we never were before, but those connections are not designed for the elderly. In fact, if you were looking for something that seems to be deliberately designed to disadvantage a segment of our population, it would be hard to find a better example than Internet connection and the elderly.

I have to admit, for much of the past year, I have been pretty focused on what I have sacrificed because of the pandemic. But I am still a pretty connected person. I can Zoom and have a virtual visit with my friends. If I wonder how my daughters are doing, I can instantly text them. If I miss their faces, I can FaceTime them. 

I have taken on the projects I’ve been able to do thanks to the privilege of being wired into the virtual world.   I can even go on a virtual bike ride with my friends through the streets of London, courtesy of Zwift.

Yes, I have given up things, but I have also been able find digital substitutes for many of those things. I’m not going to say it’s been perfect, but it’s certainly been passable.

My stepdad, who is turning 86, has been able to do none of those things. He is in a long-term care home in Alberta, Canada. His only daily social connections consist of brief interactions with staff during mealtime and when they check his blood sugar levels and give him his medication. All the activities that used to give him a chance to socialize are gone. Imagine life for him, where his sum total of connection is probably less than 30 minutes a day. And, on most days, none of that connecting is done with the people he loves.

Up until last week, family couldn’t even visit him. He was locked down due to an outbreak at his home. For my dad, there were no virtual substitutes available. He is not wired in any way for digital connection. If anyone has paid the social price of this pandemic, it’s been my dad and people like the seniors I interviewed, for whom I was desperately trying to find a way for them just to watch a 13-minute video that they had starred in.

A recent study by mobile technology manufacturer Ericsson looked specifically at the relationship between technology and seniors during the pandemic. The study focused on what the company termed the “young-old” seniors, those aged 65-74. They didn't deal with “middle-old” (aged 75-85) or “oldest-old” (86 plus) because -- well, probably because Ericsson couldn’t find enough who were connected to act as a representative sample.

But they did find that even the “young old” were falling behind in their ability to stay connected thanks to COVID-19. These are people who have owned smartphones for at least a decade, many of whom had to use computers and technology in their jobs. Up until a year ago, they were closing the technology gap with younger generations. Then, last March, they started to fall behind.

They were still using the internet, but younger people were using it even more. And, as they got older, they were finding it increasingly daunting to adopt new platforms and technology. They didn’t have the same access to “family tech support” of children or grandchildren to help get them over the learning curve. They were sticking to the things they knew how to do as the rest of the world surged forward and started living their lives in a digital landscape.

But this was not the group that was part of my video project. My experience had been with the “middle old” and “oldest old.” Half fell into the “middle old” group and half fell into the “oldest old” group. Of the eight seniors I was dealing with, only two had emails. If the “young old” are being left behind by technology, these people were never in the race to begin with. As the world was forced to reset to an online reality, these people were never given the option. They were stranded in a world suddenly disconnected from everything they knew and loved.

Predictably, the Ericsson study proposes smartphones as the solution for many of the problems of the pandemic, giving seniors more connection, more confidence and more capabilities. If only they got connected, the study says, life will be better.

But that’s not a solution with legs. It won’t go the distance. And to understand why, we just have to look at the two age cohorts the study didn’t focus on, the “middle old” and the “oldest old."

Perhaps the hardest hit have been the “oldest old,” who have sacrificed both physical and digital connection, as this Journals of Gerontologyarticle notes.   Four from my group lived in long-term care facilities. Many of these were locked down at some point due to local outbreaks within the facility. Suddenly, that family support they required to connect with their family and friends was no longer available. The technological tools  that we take for granted -- which we were able to slot in to take the place of things we were losing -- were unimaginable to them. They were literally sentenced to solitary confinement.

A recent study from Germany found that only 3% of those living in long-term care facilities used an internet-connected device. A lot of the time, cognitive declines, even when they’re mild, can make trying to use technology an exercise in frustration.

When my dad went into his long-term care home, my sister and I gave him one of our old phones so he could stay connected. We set everything up and did receive a few experimental texts from him. But soon, it just became too confusing and frustrating for him to use without our constant help. He played solitaire on it for a while, then it ended up in a drawer somewhere. We didn’t push the issue. It just wasn’t the right fit.

But it’s not just my dad who struggled with technology. Even if an aging population starts out as reasonably proficient users, it can be overwhelming to keep up with new hardware, new operating systems and new security requirements. I’m not even “young old” yet, and I’ve worked with technology all my life. I owned a digital marketing company, for heaven’s sake. And even for me, it sometimes seems like a full-time job staying on top of the constant stream of updates and new things to learn and troubleshoot. As connected technology leaps forward, it does not seem unduly concerned that it's leaving the most vulnerable segment of our population behind.

COVID-19 has pushed us into a virtual world where connection is not just a luxury, but a condition of survival. We need to connect to live. That is especially true for our seniors, who have had all the connections they relied on taken from them. We can’t leave them behind. Connected technology can no longer ignore them.

This is one gap we need to build a bridge over.