Watertown Commission on Disability

More on boomers and acquired disabilities as just being the nature of things….  From today’s Boston Globe:

Can you spot the personal communication assistant?  As boomers age, products like hearing aids are getting a style and marketing makeover
By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff  | July 30, 2007

For the past five years, Aram Donabed has worn what he calls “the traditional Silly-Putty-in-the-ear” hearing aid to help cope with hearing loss caused, he believes, by “too much loud rock ‘n’ roll music” in his youth. But when Donabed, 53, learned about a sleek new hearing aid called the Audéo—euphemistically billed not as a hearing aid but as a “personal communication assistant”—he hastened to his audiologist and got one.

“This was state-of-the-art, kind of like a Blue- tooth, really small, behind the ear, with a thin tube, and they come in all different colors,” says Donabed, who lives south of Boston and works in real estate. When he wore it, his wife wasn’t even aware he had it on. All in all, he muses, “There are a lot more choices out there than our parents had with technology.”

Indeed there are. As the 78-million-member baby boom generation confronts the physical challenges of aging, the boomers, long accustomed to throwing their economic and cultural weight around, are doing so more than ever. Companies are racing to “boomerize” products and services, adding a flashier edge to stodgy devices like hearing aids or subtly tailoring their marketing pitch to a generation that never believed it would get old—and still doesn’t [more…]