Jason DeCrow Deidre Weliky, center, leads a discussion at the Selfhelp Benjamin Rosenthal Senior Center in Flushing. Some participants, visible on the computer screen, join in from their homes.
At the Selfhelp Benjamin Rosenthal Senior Center in Queens, social worker Rachel Itzkowitz is leading the weekly current events class, guiding participants through a series of discussions. What did they think about that shooting at the Mexican border? About higher compensation for first responders injured on September 11? And what about the controversy over building a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center site?
Milton Greidinger has something to say. “A lot of baloney,” he huffs. “They don’t have to slap America in the face by putting a mosque where the damage was done. You can have religious freedom by building it on another street, that’s what I think.”
Mr. Greidinger, 86, a retired department store buyer, isn’t in the room with the half-dozen other class members. Largely homebound by mobility problems, he’s logging in from his apartment on a computer he received and learned to use just a few months ago, in a demonstration project by Selfhelp Community Services, a New York senior services organization.
With backing from Microsoft and the city’s Department on Aging, Selfhelp has created a “virtual senior center” for about a dozen low-income elderly people, with six more scheduled to join the party at the end of the summer.
Even with big touch-screen monitors and an easy-to-use interface (called It’s Never Too Late), it took twice-a-week training for a couple of months before the new users could manage the equipment. Most had never used a computer. One who’d never learned to type found the QWERTY keyboard confusing, so Microsoft substituted one with keys in alphabetical order. The group has taken advantage of adaptations like magnifiers and screen readers that read text aloud.
Bringing old people online proved to be, in other words, a labor-intensive undertaking. But Selfhelp’s Leo Asen, vice president for senior communities, is convinced that the benefits justify it.
“How do you keep homebound seniors engaged with life?” Mr. Asen said. “Their social networks are shrinking. They tend to be more isolated, perhaps depressed or anxious.” But with cameras installed at the Rosenthal center, some stationary and some rolled around on carts, he added, “Seniors at home can sign in and participate in a class, converse with the other students — it’s as if they were there.”
“It was like going from a nice, quiet retirement home back into the world of the living,” Mr. Greidinger told me later via — ahem — e-mail. He now uses his PC for a variety of useful purposes: he can order groceries online, take his blood pressure and upload the data to a personal health-management site, and watch Frank Sinatra videos on YouTube. He Skypes with his social worker.
“So not only is it a helpful gadget,” he wrote of his computer. “It is most important to my way of life.”
Already, Selfhelp reports, one homebound-but-wired senior has been able to “attend” services streamed from Manhattan’s Central Synagogue; several chat in an impromptu support group. Early results from standardized tests suggest that online engagement has reduced anxiety and loneliness, though of course you can’t really draw broad conclusions from a sample so tiny.
But what most excites advocates like Mr. Asen are the possibilities: museum tours, college classes, activities in many languages. (A new grant from UJA-Federation of New York will help expand the center’s reach in just those directions.) “We’re just scratching the surface,” he said. Though the virtual senior center is unique, “it’s not going to stay unique for long.”
Watching the current events class from Selfhelp’s Manhattan offices, what struck me, as with a Skyped doctor’s office visit I posted about recently, was that participating via computer is not like being there, at least not yet.
The virtual participants couldn’t see everyone in the room at the Rosenthal center, just Ms. Itzkowitz and two class members. The video feed occasionally froze or briefly vanished. Two women at home seemed unable to hear and didn’t join in; they were wearing headphones, but the staff thought they might have forgotten to plug them into their PCs. A 103-year-old, someone who’d had earlier computer experience, was having trouble following the discussion; technology can only do so much to stave off the declines of extreme age.
But it’s better, much better, than watching TV alone in one’s apartment. “I have been brought back into the world of now,” Mr. Greidinger wrote to me.
And one thing we know about technology is that it improves. It may never truly replace face-to-face interaction (and we may never want it to), but it could have seismic impact on elders’ lives.
“Despite the glitches inherent in any technical project, I’m very optimistic,” Mr. Asen said. “It’s a demonstration of the future.”
Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”
The virtual geezer