HITS colloquium on Aging and Technology

Prof. Wahl from the University of Heidelberg took us on a tour of aging and technology. I did some work for IBM a few years ago on Telemedicine, so I do know a bit about Telemedicine and Gerontology, so I was intrigued to hear what he had to say.

Some of the data from various studies was intriguing, however..

Prof. Wahl did start the talk with a disclaimer that the talk was elective and his own opinion

At the end of the talk I was faced with more questions than answers:

Studies of aging rely on a model which separates stimulus and activation, and which separates sensing, cognition and motor. It is the latter separation which I have problems with, for a variety of reasons:

considerable work in the new linguistics has shown the close link between cognitive capabilities, language capabilities, and embodiment
developmental studies from the first half of the 20th century show that there is a high correlation between cognition and movement
my own work on embodied learning in infants shows that initial development of cognitive, sensory and motor skills are three aspects of the same thing, and that these slowly diverge in a language and culturally dependent through infancy and childhood

in particular, i missed a statement about the scientific state of play in the parallels between infant learning and geriatric learning - but maybe this was outside the scope of the talk.

one other point came up which i think is very was important - the role of culture. i teach intercultural management at the DHBW in Mannheim, so when Prof. Wahl talked about the faster and better acceptance of robots and technology in asian countries, i was reminded by the confucian principle of wisdom, i.e. that (to use one of Prof Wahl's slides) although our sensory and motor skills get worse with increasing age, our "wisdom" actually increases.