How do we, as society, think about older people? How do we think about older people in the context of technological（科技的） change and digitalization? With the rising relevance（ 相关性） and prevalence（流行） of social media, artificial（人工的） intelligence, global communications, the global exchange of ideas and the spread（ 延伸） of ideas, when new cycles often renew（使更新） within hours or minutes and when we, as individuals, are expected to keep track of yearly（每年的） new versions of smartphones, streaming services, or voice assistance（帮助）. When we as society increasingly（日益） place hopes on technological（科技的） change to help us address（写名字地址） climate change or the challenges in our healthcare systems, when mastering（控制） and understanding technological（科技的） change and digitalization increasingly（日益） become prerequisites to be seen as a full member of society. How do we think about older people, indeed? Well, this is an example for a very common way of how we think about older people.

  It's an example from a healthcare（ 卫生保健） policy document. And what we see here is that older people are seen as a burden（担子） to our health and care systems. And technological innovations（创新） are then introduced as a potential（潜在的） solution for that. And with this, also commonly（普通地） questions are being raised as to how technologies can actually help older people, can support older people, in engaging（使从事于） in more preventative lifestyles or in the self（自己）-management of disease or in simply coping（对付） with disease. The problem with this, of course, is that it addresses older people not as citizens（公民） or consumers, but as potential patients and care recipients（容器）. And with this comes another widespread（普遍的） assumption（假定） about older people.

  That older people are not interested in the fancier, the newer, the shinier versions of new technology, but that older people are laggards, laggard users of technology that are late in adopting（采用） new technologies and for whom（谁） special arrangements need to be made so that they can remain full members of the digital society. And we know from our research that both these assumptions, older people as a burden to health and care systems and older people as laggard users of technology, are widespread. And they often lead to technologies specifically designed for older people that address and reduce older people to deficits（赤字） and problems. Let me give you an example for that. This is Mr.Baar. Mr.Baar last year made, widely（大大地） made the news, also here in the Netherlands（荷兰（西欧国家））, as the robot that catches grandma when she falls.

  And indeed, Mr.Baar is a robot, as you can see here. And he uses a wide range of sensors（传感器） and algorithms to follow people around, to detect（察觉） when they are about to lose balance and then catch them when they fall. And indeed, falls among older people are known to be an important driver of healthcare costs. So designing technological interventions（干涉） for the prevention（预防） of falls seems to be a very sensible thing to do. And Mr.Baar for sure has shown in carefully crafted（精巧地制作） laboratory environments that he is good at doing that, preventing falls. I don't think that the future will see many Mr.Baars in actual（实际的） homes, in actual lives of older people.

  Also not in actual nursing（护理） homes. But not because Mr.Baar is bad at what its designers expected him to do. Remember, he is good at catching fallers, but because he's so fundamentally（根本上） misunderstands the lives of most older people, which are here expected to have a robot, a clumsy robot, follow them around in their homes at all times. Well, Mr.Baar is a somewhat（有点） obvious, probably somewhat extreme example, of course, here. But it exemplifies（ 是…的典型）, well, a common problem that technologies have that are designed with the older people as laggard users idea in mind. They imagine the lives of older people to revolve（（使）旋转） around medical and care needs and then assume（假定） older people to be undemanding and incompetent enough to accept a whole range of clumsy, strange, somewhat alienating（使疏远） technologies in their lives.