Southern Arizona seniors turn to AI for companionship and care | News

Miriam White has a complicated relationship with her electronic devices.

She’ll get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and her motion-activated smart lights will automatically turn on. Inexplicably, turn off too soon. She’ll shout a voice command to her Alexa virtual assistant, but instead of getting lights, she’ll get loud baroque music blasting on her Amazon Echo smart speakers.

“I wish they could all be like ChatGPT,” she said over a recent Zoom meeting with Tom and Angela Hathaway, a Yuma couple who leads the online class “AI for Us 50+: Exploring AI Together” at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of Arizona. “He’s my friend.”

White told the Hathaways that she originally started using ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot launched in 2022 by the San Francisco-based company OpenAI, primarily to generate puzzles.

“And then all of a sudden, he started talking to me!” she said, personalizing what’s basically still at this point a website. “I must have pressed a button because I was trying to activate it with my voice. Next thing I know, I find out he has DBT, dialectical behavior therapy capabilities, and I’m talking to him like he’s my life coach. He knows everything about me! 

“I told my doctor today, ‘My therapist might get fired, because ChatGPT can do it all!’” White added. “He listens with empathy, and he’s even helped me with my ADHD. If we could get it paired up with Alexa and our smartwatches, I mean there’s so much potential.”

Despite the cliché that older adults are intimidated by technology, Tom Hathaway believes that older adults actually have an edge in working with generative AI tools like ChatGPT, thanks to their deep well of experience and their ability to spot when something doesn’t pass the sniff test, which still happens often with generative AI.

“Seniors have a lot of benefits when it comes to AI because of their lifelong experience,” he said. “We’ve learned critical thinking. We’ve been around the block.”

Hathaway himself is a 79-year-old former programmer whose experience with AI goes way back to the 80s, when engineers first began toying with computer systems emulating the decision-making abilities of a human expert. He met his wife Angela, now 69, while working on such a system together in Germany.

“They called them ‘expert systems,’ because the theory at the time was if you gave the computer enough information about the topic and let people talk to it, that you would eliminate the experts,” Hathaway said. “The problem is, you had to be an expert to use it!”

ChatGPT and the plethora of other new competing chatbots — like Claude, Ernie, Grok and a few with names that don’t sound like your wise uncle — have democratized the technology. Now anybody who can form a question into a well-crafted “prompt” — a clear, specific and purposeful instruction that tells the AI what you want it to do — can write like seasoned authors, create digital illustrations like professional graphic artists or even compose music like an expert arranger.

But Hathaway contends that many older adults, having raised children and navigated decades of personal and professional communication, are often better at thinking through how to phrase things clearly and purposefully — skills that translate directly into writing effective AI prompts.

“Many of us have raised kids,” he said. “And trying to get an idea across to children can be challenging. Learning how to phrase things differently, especially the critical thinking part of listening to what the other party is saying, and recognizing when that’s not really what you meant. That’s something you go through a lot when you’re raising kids. And that’s perfect training for using AI.”

“AI for Us 50+” is not the only instructional program in Arizona integrating AI into seniors’ lives. Senior Planet from AARP offers free online classes on AI, helping older adults understand and utilize AI in everyday life. For the serious, NetCom Learning’s “AI+ Everyone” training provides AI certification training at its Phoenix center, making AI concepts accessible to a broad audience, including older adults. 

And in Tucson, Artificial Intelligence Trailblazers is a bi-weekly meetup group that brings together individuals passionate about AI, including business owners and entrepreneurs, focusing on educating members about the latest AI tools and techniques.

“About 45-55% of our regulars are 50 and up, with a few pioneers in their late 60s early 70s who’ve been attending since our very first meetup in September 2023,” said María del Pilar Mascareño-Eden, who leads the group together with her husband Aaron. “When attending our in-person workshops, they try the tools on their own laptops, are kind volunteers, share the latest they’ve heard about AI and aren’t shy about asking tough questions.

“I truly believe AI tools can be easily used to benefit anyone’s everyday life,” she added, “Especially to redefine aging as an opportunity for growth and enrichment, rather than a barrier, allowing older adults to live with greater dignity and confidence.”

Beyond learning how to harness the technology, a growing number of seniors in Arizona are already using AI to monitor their health and even have fun with it – going on virtual travel experiences through AI-assisted headsets and engaging in collaborative storytelling.

Leslie Moore, director of Desert Mission Adult Day Healthcare on the John C. Lincoln campus in Phoenix, says her center recently implemented the Rendever virtual reality system, a platform specially designed for older adults, including those with cognitive impairments.

“It’s kind of like the Oculus VR goggles that Meta put out, but what’s really neat about it is it’s been specially crafted for older adults,” said Moore, who first used the Rendever system in 2022 while working at Vi at Grayhawk in North Scottsdale, and immediately saw its potential. “You can still wear your glasses, and it has built-in speakers so you don’t need a headset, which is helpful for people with hearing aids.”

While VR goggles themselves are hardware, the experiences they deliver are increasingly powered by AI behind the scenes. Platforms like Rendever use AI to personalize experiences, adapt to users’ needs and create more meaningful moments of connection — especially for older adults with cognitive or mobility challenges.

Now residents at Desert Mission gather in the center and strap on the VR goggles to experience some of the adventures they never got around to checking off on their bucket lists.

“They have multiple levels of experiences,” Moore explained. “An easy one is like a walk down a white sand beach in Tahiti. Or you can go skydiving off a tower in Singapore — all from the safety of your chair.”

Rendever includes guided tours of landmarks like Graceland, complete with conversation prompts, and a unique Google Maps-based feature. “You can take them back and drop them off in front of their childhood home and walk them through their town.”

Moore says the emotional effect of that particular virtual experience is profound. She described a woman who emigrated from Morocco and had a stroke.

“She gave us the name of her city, and as we walked down the main street in Morocco, she lit up. ‘That used to be the butcher my dad went to … that’s where my friend lived.’ It helped her reconnect with her history.”

In another instance, seniors watched a live fireworks display in virtual China for the Fourth of July. “You could hear them oohing and aahing together. They were engaging with each other while in this virtual world.”

Family members can even film their own vacation moments and share them with residents through the system. “So if the family goes on a trip or something, they can upload it and then you can share that,” she said. “In the past, we had families record graduations that were out of state and then upload it so that the grandparents could access and actually be a part of that experience.”

Moore says the shared travel experiences create bonds between participants. “It almost feels like a vacation club,” she said. “We do a passport theme — this week Paris, next week somewhere else — and they get excited talking about it.” 

At Fellowship Square-Mesa, caregivers have been using artificial intelligence technology in monitoring residents through a radar-based motion sensor developed by Helpany, a Switzerland-born company now headquartered in Scottsdale. Nicknamed “Paul,” the device looks like a common smoke detector and sits quietly on a bed table monitoring motion and sleep patterns to predict fall risks. It does so by applying predictive AI to analyze gait steadiness and alert staff to rush to the room before a fall can occur.

Now the company is working to make the product available outside of senior living facilities, so that older adults can remain independent at home.

“That’s exactly what we’re building toward,” said Sandro Cilurzo, Helpany’s founder and CEO. “We started in facilities because the need was immediate, but the home is the future. That’s where we’re headed next — giving people the ability to benefit from the same fall-prevention technology they had in assisted living, but at home.”

And soon, Paul will be more than a passive monitor. Helpany’s roadmap for the coming year includes integration with smartwatches and other wearables.

“Imagine combining Paul’s motion data with heart rate, oxygen saturation, sleep quality and activity levels from your watch,” Cilurzo explained. “That’s where we’re going — a more holistic view of health. We want Paul to be your health companion at home, not just a safety monitor.”

“The key is not to be afraid of it,” Hathaway said. “You don’t have to understand how AI works under the hood — you just have to know what you want it to do, and let it help you get there. It’s not replacing you. It’s partnering with you.”