Spotlight: February 2010 Newsletter

Linked Senior

Empowering Seniors Through Technology
(Affinity Lab member)

Please tell us about your product(s):

Linked Senior: Our product brings education, and entertainment audio content to people living in retirement communities through non threatening technology. Our ergonomically designed personal device can be loaded through a senior friendly dedicated network with renewable, on demand content. The Linked Senior technology overcomes the barrier that technology is, by bringing an intuitive, adaptive and user friendly product to seniors. Our approach is based on extensive field and literature research on the needs of this booming demographic.

Why did you jump in and start your company?

Linked Senior: The idea stems from the fact that retirement communities tend to be secluded places where loneliness, boredom and helpness account for the bulk of the suffering. By opening up these communities to the world and fostering social communities, we provide seniors a mean to stay active and connected. We also help caregivers perform their task more efficiently by saving costs and empowering them with highly personalized content.

What brought you to Washington, DC?

Linked Senior: Herve and Charles, the co-founders of Linked Senior, first traveled to the US as students respectively in 2000 and 2003. We worked for different companies before starting our own in 2007

You're working with a very popular target market of "baby boomers". What advice would you give to other companies working with this same market?

Linked Senior: A lot of people will tell you that it's a promising market and full of potential, which is true, but this doesn't mean that it doesn't bear its challenges as well.
To design something for seniors, especially when it comes to technology, it is important to take three ideas into account:

• Things need to be simple; simple as in simple
• It is important to bear in mind different types of possible impairments: visual, hearing, dexterity... Color contrasts is a good example but also look and feel: small buttons are difficult to handle. Universal design rules should be studied.
• Whatever you do should not be labeled "for the elderly" and shouldn't shout out loud "I'm over 90". If products & services can be fun and cool while remembering the two previous points, then go for it!

What's next for Linked Senior?

Linked Senior: Fun.
As we bring fun to people in retirement communities, we also hope to have as much fun as possible on the way; based on our track record, we're pretty good at it!!!

Charles de Vilmorin and Hervé Vu Roussel
Linked Senior