“Watch this!”
Mary Caley pulled her chair up to the computer and activated her email account, excited to show off an animated teddy-bears greeting card she had received from her grandchildren.
Just a few months ago, the 86-year-old resident of London, Ont.’s Windermere on the Mount Retirement Residence would never have dreamed she’d be calling up emailed cards, messages and pictures of a granddaughter’s wedding on a computer screen.
Likewise for 90-year-old Orangeville, Ont. resident Cora McCune.
“I can’t type and I don’t know a thing about a computer,” she admits. Yet she is exchanging emails and photos with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren across the country on a daily basis.
Both women are using a new computer interface, developed by a couple of enterprising medical biophysics students in London, Ont., both driven by needs experienced in their own families.
One of them is McCune’s grandson, Stephen Beath.
“When my grandfather passed away a couple of years back – and I have a large family on my mother’s side – we all thought ‘let’s get Grandma a computer so she can stay in touch with us,’” Beath says. “Since I’m the computer nerd of the family, everyone came to me.”
He began looking for something that would be easy to use and was “shocked” that he could find nothing he considered suitable.
Meanwhile Raul Rupsingh had been teaching his mom to use email to correspond with family members in Malaysia and was watching her struggle with attachments and files.
“We were wondering why everyone was making seniors adapt to technology instead of adapting the technology to the seniors,” Rupsingh says.
He and Beath teamed up to develop the new interface, called SoftShell, a senior-friendly program that uses a touch screen and microphone so that users can activate its functions – email, photographs, games and internet – by simply touching a button on the screen. The buttons are large with an easy-to-read font and the computer will speak the words on the screen and allow the user to speak the email message.
It can be used with a keyboard and mouse, but the touch-and-speak ability makes it a good fit for people with vision problems or arthritis that make typing difficult, Rupsingh says.
While they were developing the program, Beath and Rupsingh worked with volunteers from London’s Horton Street Seniors Centre to make sure they were on the right track.
Says Beath, “When we do something, we throw it in front of our target audience and if it doesn’t fly, it doesn’t fly.”
A survey of seniors, asking what they would do with a computer, revealed that email was at the top of the list with photos second, games third and using the internet a distant fourth. So those were the functions Beath and Rupsingh started with although they don’t rule out adding more in the future. The photo function automatically downloads and displays any pictures sent via email so there’s no need to understand how to save and file them away.
“It’s quite the thing,” says McCune, adding that she will often email her daughter in the morning to say she’s up and dressed and her daughter will respond with her plans for the day. “And the pictures are fun, that the kids send me. And then, I’ve always played solitaire so I play that a lot.
Caley and her fellow residents at Windermere on the Mount agree. In fact, it’s been so popular there that the parent company, Revera, has rolled it out it to its other residences across the county, says Sara O’Neill, marketing director at Windermere. A pilot project there last year got a positive response and now the residence’s single SoftShell computer is in constant use.
Beath and Rupsingh are now looking to move into the U.S. market. Last fall, they took their prototype into The Dragon’s Den, the entrepreneurs show, appearing on CBC-TV. With the help of 84-year-old London senior, Hazel Brunt, they scored a deal with three of the Dragons but, in the end, did not sign any contracts.
“It just wasn’t the right deal for us at the time,” Beath says. But they have moved into new Toronto offices – at an incubator site for small tech businesses. And in April they are taking their product to the Long Term Care and Retirement Communities Convention, to be held April 5 to 7 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
The SoftShell program can downloaded from the internet at mysoftshell.com. A two-month free trial is available and to continue the service, which includes the email account, the price is $8 per month or $80 per year. Revera welcomes anyone interested to see a demonstration at any of their residences. To find one check reveraliving.com/softshell.asp.