HERMAN BOUMA AND GERONTECHNOLOGY—A VIEW FROM THE USA

James L. Fozard, Ph.D., Director of Geriatric Research, Morton Plant Mease Health Care, Clearwater, FL 33756

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Gerontechnology is concerned with the design of technological products, environments and services for aging and aged people. Related activities in the United States grow out of human factors engineering and ergonomics, and industrial design practices. Since its origins over a decade ago at the Eindhoven University of Technology, gerontechnology has stretched and expanded concepts and practices in both areas in the United States.

Human Factors and Ergonomics

In the United States, human factors engineering had its beginnings as an applied discipline in World War II and has been an integral part of military technology development since. Today, ergonomics is part of the curriculum of psychology and industrial engineering in universities throughout the world. The application of ergonomics to aging developed slowly in the United States until the past decade when expansion of interest in the field burgeoned. Arnold Small, a founder and charter member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, initiated the Society’s Technical Group on Aging in the 1970s. It now has almost three hundred members.

The idea that the optimal person-environment interaction should differ across the age span is the central concept linking gerontology and ergonomics. The idea that the central scientific concept of aging should be the transaction between a person and the physical and social environment is certainly not novel. In gerontology it has been put forth by Klaus Riegel and later by Powell Lawton. It is difficult to give operational meaning to that concept in designing research. Gerontechnology has provided some conceptual tools that make the task easier.

How does gerontechnology stretch the boundaries of American ergonomics? I count four ways. First, gerontechnology posits that the course of aging may be altered by redesigning the built environment, technical products and services. As a corollary, technical products and devices may be fashioned to monitor physiological and behavioral processes of aging over time so that the long range effects of life style and medical interventions can be assessed better than earlier. This puts a public health angle on technology for human use. As a scientist who has devoted most of my career to the scientific study of aging, this is the most important ‘boundary stretching’ provided by gerontechnology. At the Eindhoven University of Technology, this idea that was a driving force behind the recent proposal to develop an engineering degree in public health.

Second, gerontechnology provides a modern economic context for understanding the development, distribution and development of technological products and services for older persons. I vividly recall Herman Bouma describing this idea as technology push vs. consumer pull during a working session at the first international conference on gerontechnology held in Eindhoven in 1991. At that same lecture and in later writings and lectures, Bouma further described the interdependence between gerontechnology and other physical and social sciences.

Third, gerontechnology stretched ergonomics to include the use of developing technical products and services that enhance the performance of new opportunities in old age activities for communication, work, leisure, and learning. The traditional focus of ergonomics applied to aging had been on products and environments that compensate for declining physical and mental functioning in old age.

Fourth, it stresses the importance of user involvement in needs assessment for technological services and products as well as in their design and evaluation. Although the use of focus groups and consumer evaluation is part of the toolbox of ergonomics, the use of experimental methodology and task analysis by experts dominated the research techniques of the field. In this domain, gerontechnology resembles the contemporary movement in industrial design more than classic ergonomics.

A personal link between research on aging, ergonomics and gerontechnology

I can safely say that I am a living history of the linkages between the USA and the Netherlands with respect to human factor research in the United States and the development of gerontechnology in the United States. Parts of my early graduate training and research experience were in human factors engineering mostly as applied to military applications. I abandoned this activity after establishing my research career in gerontology although much of my research on cognitive aging had an applied element in it. Thanks to Arnold Small, one of my mentors in graduate school, I was able to revisit ergonomics as it related to aging, and during the 1970s and early 80s I made several professional contributions to the field.

A couple of years before I met Herman Bouma in 1991, I was introduced to the concept of gerontechnology by Ir. Jan Graafmans. I met Graafmans during my tenure as the Chair of the Technical Group on Aging of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and Director of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging operated by the National Institute on Aging. At the time, it seemed like a clever name for the ergonomics or human factors engineering as applied to older persons. As I was to learn, that view was too simple.

Graafmans and Bouma invited me to prepare a keynote address on aging for the first International Conference on Gerontechnology and to serve on the advisory board for that conference, held in Eindhoven in August, 1991. The lecture and the paper based on it gave me and my colleagues at NIH the opportunity to re-describe a substantial literature on physiological and behavioral aspects of aging in a way that highlighted the importance of the environment in understanding aging. The practical implications of the lecture emphasized the traditional ergonomic approaches to overcoming some of the sensory, cognitive and physical limitations of aging. But, most importantly, the lecture began our thinking about the potential of long term environmental interventions for altering the course of aging itself. In order to further develop this concept, I arranged to spend a sabbatical year with Bouma and colleagues.

During my year as a visiting professor at Eindhoven, we formulated a list of the major uses of gerontechnology. Of the five "uses" of gerontechnology—prevention, compensation, enhancement, research and aid to caregivers—prevention is universally identified as the most "powerful and novel." One example of the application of this concept at Eindhoven is the Ph.D. project of Marielle Snijders on "healthy indoor air" supervised by Prof. Johanna van Bronswijk. Snijders is measuring the quality and dynamics of indoor and outdoor air over long periods of time to identify the characteristics of indoor air that alleviate or minimize symptoms of COPD. The goal is to create standards for air quality. Her approach represents a departure from conventional engineering approaches to defining air quality which are more technology oriented and which defined good air quality in terms of the combinations of air velocity, humidity and temperature that would resemble outside air.

Gerontechnology and Industrial Design

The links between industrial design in the United States and gerontechnology are close although I think the conceptual basis for gerontechnology is somewhat broader. However, concepts such as universal design, practical anthropometry, and user involvement in evaluation and development of products are evident in the work of American designers such as Pirkl, many architects, and designers of therapeutic environments for rehabilitation such as that by David Guynes and Patricia Moore.

Current impact of gerontechnology in the United States

In the 1999 meeting of the American Society on Aging in Orlando, Florida, I counted over a half dozen references to gerontechnology in the sessions dealing with institutional and home environments for elderly people. The Computer Human Interaction meeting to be held in May 1999 includes a two-day developmental consortium on uses of computers by older persons as well as a technical session on making technology user-friendly by seniors. In California, there is an active research project analyzing the development of the "Seniornet," a nationwide US movement by seniors to train other seniors to use computers and participate in cyberspace activities. There is significant participation in gerontechnology by American scientists including Powell Lawton, Victor Regnier and Neil Charness, all of whom are leaders in research on aging.

Herman Bouma has played a leading role in the development of gerontechnology. His writings and lectures have been of central importance in defining the field in the Netherlands and internationally. As a former director of a prominent applied research laboratory, the Instituut voor Perceptie Onderzoek and as a professor at this University he has facilitated and led the development of the field at this university. I am proud and grateful to count myself as a friend and colleague of Herman Bouma whom we honor today.

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