Causes of Isolation and Loneliness contributing factors

There are a number of things that can contribute to social isolation and loneliness.  They can range from aspects of your mental and physical health to where you live and your financial situation.  Each one has the potential to limit human contact and thus increase the chances of social isolation.

Hearing.  This is a big one.  You may not be able to talk on the phone.  Group meetings or basic social interactions can be hard.  It could be very easy to lose contact with friends.

Eyesight.  Deteriorating vision can limit driving, mobility, reading, and more.  Poor eyesight may cause you to stay in your room more; you may not feel as confident now as you used to when you could see better.  For example, you don’t go out as much because you feel more vulnerable and less secure.  This lack of mobility can make you feel like you are stuck in your own prison.

Poor physical health.  For example, a heart condition.  Poor health may prevent you from participating in your previous hobbies (e.g., golf).  Older adults may have to find new hobbies due to physical ailments.  This could contribute to greater social isolation.

Mobility issues.  Examples could include not being able to walk very well, not being able to drive anymore and living somewhere with limited access to public transportation.  Obviously, factors that could lead to increased isolation.

Age-segregated communities.  The type of housing we occupy can greatly affect not only our physical but also our mental wellbeing.  Poorly designed housing complexes, coupled with an age-segregated population of older adults needing help with basic living, could contribute to unhappiness from a sense of isolation, decreased mobility, ill health, and cognitive decline.   

Cognitive or memory impairment.  Dementia can add a very complicated layer to the already complicated issue of isolation and loneliness in older adults.  It can contribute to, as well as exacerbate, isolation and loneliness.  It makes loneliness mitigation attempts even more challenging and difficult.

Fixed income.  Unfortunately, having lower and fixed incomes can be limiting when you age.   Tight finances can limit the options and opportunities available to some older adults, thus possibly increasing isolation and maybe loneliness.  For example, affording home-care services, or the basic costs of leisurely endeavours.

Retired/empty nester.  The daily and weekly social interactions that you may have been used to, or happened kind of automatically at work or with previous household members, are now not there anymore.  The family may be farther away, making isolation more likely.

Death of a partner/spouse and friends.  It can be hard to replace old, longtime friends with new ones.  And even if you can, it often takes time.  Isolation and loneliness can sometimes creep in.

Lack of purpose or meaning in life.  This can sometimes be a core reason for loneliness.  There’s an old saying that everyone needs something to make them get up and out of bed in the morning.

Difficulty making contact with others.  For some people, it can be hard to interact with other people.  Sometimes, you just need to get out of your comfort zone to initiate social connections.  It can be easy to talk oneself out of it.  Often times, it is the hardest part and you just need to force yourself to do it.

Alexa is my friend

"Alexa is my friend" is a comment that many of the seniors who were interacting with the tool said. It seems there are times when it is nice to have a friendly AI to talk to — and to have her play music; tell you about the weather; adjust your lights, and tell you a joke when you need to hear one. So, if you are alone, perhaps this interaction is a way to combat loneliness.

There are many groups looking at this issue, AARP Foundation has a program for "Social Connectedness Voice-activated Technology", which has a goal of determining whether the technology of this type can help older adults fight isolation and loneliness. And Front Porch and the Consumer Technology Association Foundation are rolling out Alexa to senior living facilities in the hope of impacting loneliness and isolation via the Voice-activated Independence for Smart Home Engagement (VISHN) initiative.

This is a great place to start. As Tech Life worked with seniors and the Amazon Echo Show, with its excellent video-call capability, they realized that there is now the potential for something even better than humans interacting with an AI. That is interacting with Other Humans (with Alexa's Help)

The seniors working with Tech Life, when talking about Alexa, inevitably someone will say: "But I don't really want to talk to a machine. I want to interact more with other people."

In its latest form, Tech Life believes that Alexa has the potential to help facilitate deeper, and more frequent, human to human interactions.

There are two aspects to the combination of Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show that made Tech Life excited about the potential for more (and better) engagement between older adults and their friends and family.

The biggest and most important capability is a super simple, video call capability. You just say "Alexa, call John" and (so long as you did the initial setup correctly), Alexa places a video call to the "John" you had in mind, and his face appears on the Echo Show and you can interact with him.

My friends and I make conventional phone calls, with a voice command, and it is very easy. However, as we age and, in that ageing, develop physical or mental imperfections might make it harder to make a phone call with more conventional technology this voice capability becomes more important.

Life happens and as we age, we circle of friends and family grows smaller. As we age many of us now have close friends and family members who live somewhere sufficiently far away to make face-to-face meetings less frequent than we would like. What many of us want are more (and/or deeper) interactions with those distant friends and family members.

In my opinion, technology has a real role to play here. I talk to my daughter who lives in Australia, but we have deeper and more meaningful conversations when we video chat. Now we use Facebook Messenger now, but earlier we used Skype. Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show seems like the next easy transition to make.

I know that the "perfect" technology does not yet exist, and the "best technology that does exist" seems to be too complicated for many people to want to use. There is a sort of adoption barrier, the height of which relates to how hard people think the technology is to use.

For many years video calls were the best way (so far) to Interact at a distance and people found this out when Skype made this option available to many of us. Apple started offering its FaceTime option and then others followed. Facebook now offers a video messenger as does Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show and I am sure many other social media platforms offer this option as well.

I (and many others) have found that video calls are the next best thing for staying in touch — both with family members and with friends and acquaintances. It seems there is a depth of connection you get with a video that is just not there with a conventional voice call. And video calls seem to make it easier to just "hang out", even if you don't have a specific set of information to impart.

But here is the problem. Today's video call technology, while enormously better than in the recent past, is still intimidating to many of the older adults.

I am not a big Apple fan, but my wife and son are, and my son uses Facetime and tells me it is remarkably simple and has excellent quality. And for a one on one conversation when both parties are comfortable using Facetime, he is not sure it can be improved on.

The potential for Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show is for the many seniors are just not comfortable using Facetime, or are not in the Apple world (competitors like Skype are harder to use in my opinion), and many don't have a smartphone or a computer with a camera.

The big advantages of a video call on the Amazon Echo Show are the simplicity: "Alexa call John". And the specific hardware implementation (all in one; no need for smartphone or computer; loud and high-quality sound).

A quite different challenge that many of the older adults are interested in addressing is how to make new friends, or meet acquaintances who share common interests.

One of the challenges is that the people who we can easily interact with (because they live close by, or attend the same church or Village meetings you do) are not necessarily the people we share interests or have the personality traits that will make them our best friend.

In our society, older adults are often segregated by age, and people make the assumption is that we will want to hang out with others just because we are of a similar age. But what if, like me, you care less about a person's age than about their interests or opinions or type of personality?

Affinity groups as a way to meet new people is an intriguing idea. Would it be interesting to be part of a group characterized not just by age, but by something you care about such as a common interest or shared experience? Today there are many examples of this. There are Meetups. And there are various online "meeting" sites, where you can make new friends. And we think these are excellent ideas.

But what if the Meetup you want to attend is too far away? Or if it is at night and you don't like to go out at night?

This is where we are wondering if the Amazon Echo Show might play a role. Maybe this could be the tool that makes it easier to attend meetings remotely, opening up a new group of potential human-human interactions?

There are many ideas, but Tech Life’s opinion, the largest issue, especially for a target demographic of older adults, is the complexity of getting Alexa set up in the first place. Maybe this is not a huge deal. But it would certainly be an excellent improvement if the setup process could be made simpler.

Tech Life came to the conclusion that the combination of a voice-activated AI — and the easy video call a capability which that AI can facilitate on one's behalf — might be a real game-changer as we seek tools to reduce social isolation. Time will tell if they are right, but I think they are on to a great idea.

Remember our troops

My nephew is serving on Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) Ottawa, which departed from her homeport of CFB Esquimalt Tuesday for a four-and-a-half-month-long deployment to the Asia-Pacific Region.

The deployment is part of the Canadian government’s commitment to operations in the region and as part of ongoing United Nations sanctions against North Korea.

Starting early October, the renewed Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) contribution to the multinational effort in the Asia-Pacific region will be a CP-140 Aurora, along with the crew and supporting personnel, operating from Japan.

HMCS Ottawa will join the international maritime monitoring mission periodically between late August and mid-November.

He is serving our country as did his grandfather and his great uncles. This day is a day to remember the men and women who serve our country and willingly put themselves in harm's way so that we can enjoy our freedom. Here is are the numbers of those who died in service to us. The important point to remember when reading statistics of war service is to appreciate the fact that every number represents a person.

These are men and women who grew up, had families and left loved ones behind.

One of the best ways to remember and support our vets is to wear a Poppy. By making a donation and wearing a Poppy, Canadians of all ages support the Legion’s mission to serve veterans and their dependents while also promoting Remembrance. The sale of wreaths and the Poppy Campaign make it possible for the Legion to operate a National Service Bureau which acts as an advocate for veterans and their dependents seeking compensation from the government for service-incurred disabilities. Every year, more than a million dollars of the money raised through the campaign is used for direct assistance for ex-service people and their dependents in financial distress. The funds are used to pay for food, accommodation, utilities, dental and optical services and hospital comforts.

It is also important to note that over the years many millions of dollars have been given to worthy charities or spent providing valuable services, such as Meals on Wheels, to seniors. The campaign’s expenses, meanwhile, remain low owing in large part to the national network of volunteers who distribute the Poppies.

The money collected is held in trust and cannot be spent on anything other than the purposes specifically authorized in the General By-laws of the Legion.

If you do nothing else today, buy a poppy and hold one minute of silence at 11:00 to remember our serving troops and our veterans who fought for our freedom and who continue to put themselves in harm's way for us.

Do you have Amazon Echo Show?

Over the next few posts, I will be focusing on some technology that might help us as we age, the ideas come from the work done at Tech life. 

Some of my tech friends think that Alexa or Amazon Echo might help combat isolation and loneliness. This is an interesting idea and one that was explored by Tech Life a while back. I thought I would share some of their thoughts.  

When we look at the idea of using these tools to combat isolation and loneliness there are two separate ideas about how it could be done.

First, there is the idea, getting a fair bit of media attention, that interaction between an older adult and an AI (Alexa) might help reduce isolation.

Second is the idea that Alexa (an AI) can facilitate deeper human to human interactions (with friends and family for example) as well.

It's this second idea that Tech life found intriguing and based on their recent explorations of Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show, they think this tool has real potential to combat isolation and loneliness.

Alexa is an artificial intelligence (AI) developed by Amazon and made available in a family of hardware products with names like the Amazon Echo, the Amazon Echo Dot and recently the Amazon Echo Show.

To understand how older adults would interact Tech Life had older adults interact with the tools. Most of these adults said that having artificial intelligence to interact with was certainly cool, and found it very useful. The question that Tech life wanted to explore was if Alexa could also improve the depth and quantity of our interactions with our fellow humans to reduce isolation and loneliness.

Social Isolation and Loneliness are complex conditions, with a variety of contributing causes which vary greatly from person to person.

But there are several ways in which you can imagine Alexa can make a difference.

·       Interactions directly with an AI (Alexa herself);

·       Interactions with other humans — made easier or better or more frequent by Alexa.

And as far as interacting with humans is concerned, there are two subcategories that Tech Life explored:

·       Deeper interactions with friends and family who live far away; and

·       Making new friends; or finding acquaintances with the right interests or personalities.