The goggles dim your eyesight, the weights imitate muscle loss, the shoes make you feel like you might trip. When Will Pavia, 40, tries out an ageing suit, he has a new perspective on being elderly. And that's the point, says its inventor, Joseph Coughlin.
My head cranes forward and my body is stiff and heavy, as if I'm carrying a load. I'm not quite sure what is behind and around me, and this makes me anxious. Sitting down, I reach backwards with one hand for the chair. Getting up is difficult.
I am in a research laboratory in Boston, a white warehouse space, though to a man in my condition, it all looks hazy, uneven and yellow. "That's not legally blind right now," says a voice to my right.
I try to turn my head, but it's difficult.
"That's just low vision," says the voice.
It is Joseph Coughlin, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, an institution established to help humanity prepare for the great gift of growing old. He's a compact, peppy sort of chap in a bright bow tie, a dark blazer and bright blue trousers. I can't really see his face.
I'm wearing a contraption that transports you into old age. It is called the Age Gain Now Empathy System, or Agnes. Coughlin was pleased with the title because it sounded like the name of a nice old lady. "I was a former defence and US Department of Transportation contractor," he says. "I love my acronyms."
Coughlin came up with the idea for Agnes, which was then developed by the AgeLab team, for designers at the Daimler company, who were rethinking the interior of the Mercedes. An exercise physiologist calibrated a system of weights and harnesses that would simulate muscle loss and arthritis and other natural shocks that flesh is heir to when you're getting on a bit. Then they added these appalling yellow goggles that give you the low vision. They wanted the young designers to feel "the three Fs", Coughlin says. "The friction, the fatigue and indeed the frustration that older adults feel when trying to change the radio or when getting in and out of the vehicle."
The Agnes suit turned out to be a huge hit with the designers and for the laboratory, which was founded in 1999 in part to tackle what the director regards as the failure of companies to make nice things for old people. It made no sense to him. About 8.5 per cent of human beings are over 65. By 2050, that percentage will have doubled and the planet will have the demographic profile, more or less, of the retirement haven that is Florida. In his book The Longevity Economy, Coughlin compares it to a new continent – one billion people whose wealth will soon make them the dominant force in the economies of many nations.
But designers tend to be young men. They make smartphones that are too large for some women to hold. They seek solutions for problems in their own lives. If you ask them to make something for an old man or woman, they start thinking of pill dispensers and remote controls with giant rubber buttons.
"When they think old, they think health," says Coughlin. "I can't tell you how many GPS-enabled walkers I've had students present to us, and systems that beep and punch you in the night to get you to take your meds, because unfortunately so many people believe that the only thing we're going to be doing in old age is taking our meds, checking our blood pressure and waiting. God knows for what, but we're waiting."
The products usually come in hospital hues. "It is incredible how many products aimed at older adults are puke beige or clinical blue," says Coughlin.
Consider the hearing aid. I must admit I hadn't really, until I read Coughlin's book. But why are they made in a shade of fleshy pink, so that it seems as if your ear has grown a cyst? Glasses are made to look fabulous. Why isn't that true of hearing aids, asks Coughlin. Why isn't Prada making them? It's because they're associated with old age. The result, he says, is that 80 per cent of people who need hearing aids in America don't get them and a quarter of those who do don't wear them.
By 2050, 17 per cent of the planet will be over 65, roughly the same as retirement haven Florida now.
There's a long list of spectacular failures when it comes to making things for old people. In the Sixties, scientists at Heinz spent years concocting a sort of baby food for old people. It seemed like a great idea to bosses. Babies eat Heinz baby food for only about a year, whereas an old person who cannot chew might subsist on Heinz Senior Foods. They were quickly proved wrong on this point. No one wants to step up to the till with a can that announces to the cashier that you are a toothless old codger who subsists on mush. Chrysler ran into a similar problem in the Sixties when it made an old person's car. Motor companies now consider it a universal truth that you can sell a young man's car to an old man, but you can't sell an old man's car to a young man or, in fact, to anyone.
The most striking example of this dynamic is the story of those emergency pendants with an alarm button for people who live alone. "Nobody wants to wear a product that says 'old man walking and about to fall down', " says Coughlin. Some companies sought to disguise them as jewellery, but it didn't seem to matter. "It doesn't matter whether the rest of the world knows that a certain piece of jewellery can summon an ambulance," writes Coughlin. "What matters is that you know it."
This is also partly why the AgeLab needed Agnes. It's not just that young designers don't understand old age; it's that old people won't tell them about it. "I'll give you an example," says Coughlin. "An older person is more likely to open up a plastic bottle of water and, with arthritic hands, have difficulty with the grip. They squeeze the bottle, the cap flies off, they get soaked. Your old wet water-drinker will say, 'Damn, I don't like it, but old age is just plain tough.' But a young designer wearing Agnes will say, 'Wait a minute. We can redesign this.' "
The Agnes contraption is wrapped around a silver mannequin and looking like something the CIA might use in an interrogation. To the right is a red and white robot called VGo that moves about on two wheels. Above the base, the robot rises in a slender arch, at the top of which, at about chest height, there is a screen.
"It can be used by remote control," says Coughlin. Suppose you have an elderly mother who lives alone and is not answering the phone. You can send VGo scurrying through her house, like a droid through the Death Star, and receive a feed of what it sees while your face appears on its screen. "You can see your mother and she can see you," says Coughlin. "It will save you many midnight trips to check Mum is OK."
Nearby on a white counter are furry creatures that look like cuddly toys: a fat white seal and a cat. The seal is called Paro. It's a "therapeutic robot" built in Japan. Coughlin says it serves as a companion for older people.
I spend a while puzzling over this, wondering how it could work. What would happen, for instance, if I gave the robotic seal to my father. Wouldn't he be insulted? Wouldn't he hurl it across the room?
The director picks it up and hands it to me. It's about the size of a baby and you end up holding it like one in your arms, while it turns its head to look at you with soulful dark eyes. "It's got computer vision," says Coughlin. "There are sensors throughout." It moves in my arms and the sensation is not unlike that of holding a cat and feeling the bones shift under the skin.
"Hooo! Hooo!" it says.
"People say, 'Why would I want that?' " says Coughlin. "But after they get to know it, they are far more forgiving and start to adopt it."
A student who worked at the lab kept it on her desk. Coughlin would hear her talking to it, saying, "Paro, stop kicking the paper clips off my desk." Paro did this because she wasn't talking to it. The seal is an attention-seeker.
Coughlin says it's also used for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. "Gives them something to touch," he says. "Something to focus on."
There are weights, braces, bungee cords and a neck harness. 'They put you off-balance'.
It costs £5,000 ($10,000) and it's hard to think that we would all rush out and buy one, though I wonder if the cost is part of how it works. I remember holding my eldest child, newborn, and having the vague notion, which I tried to dispel, that we had just acquired an incredibly expensive toy. Something that could not be dropped. It was a different order of magnitude, obviously, to a cuddle with a robotic seal, but we do form relationships with things. My father had this penknife he was very close to.
"We name our boats, typically female names," says Coughlin. "We name our cars. Imagine something that's entire intent is to be concentrated on you. There's a certain, albeit strange, affection that we can develop there."
Hospitals and nursing homes will have them, he thinks, and it may be something you rent, rather than buy. The cat robot is a simpler, cheaper version (around £100), though Coughlin doesn't think it works. Most of us have held a cat and know what one should look like and we are quick to judge the robotic version, "So you're busy arguing with the design rather than engaging with it."
I put Paro down and it keeps hooting, calling to me from the counter. The AgeLab staff sit or stand at their desks around us, young people mostly, making lists and graphs and examining data. A third of them are psychologists of various stripes, says Coughlin. There are also some data scientists, some engineers, some political scientists. "I think we even have an economist in by mistake."
Coughlin's father was an engineer who worked on the Apollo space programme. His mother was in the US Air Force. As a 10-year-old in New Jersey, "People used to call me a 40-year-old midget because, as an only child, most of those I considered to be my friends were old folks," he says. He first got interested in them, professionally speaking, while working on a government study on how to adapt America's transport infrastructure for an ageing society. What bothered him then, and still does, is that none of the experts planning for this grey future "addressed the f-word".
He pauses in a practised way. "Fun," he continues. "I know where you were going, but the whole fun part – dressing fun or being sexy, or playing or doing extreme sports."
The director says the attitude dates to a 19th-century notion that human beings were endowed with a certain quantity of "vital force" that we would use up very quickly if we had too much fun. Too much sex, for instance, even by yourself: that was considered a real drain on one's vital force. Before the theory gained currency, human beings were considered individuals with their own particular bodies, Coughlin writes. Now the old were all lumped together into a class of withered vessels whose force was spent.
The Europeans began to abandon the theory as French and German pathologists dissecting the cadavers of older people found evidence of actual things that might have killed them, but the "vital force" theory persisted in Britain and the United States. With it came the idea that old people represented a huge problem for society.
"The greatest success of humankind, I believe, is global longevity and longer life," says Coughlin. In 1900, you could expect to die when you were in your forties. Since then, life expectancy had doubled. "But policymakers, pundits, researchers unfortunately, are trying to translate this achievement into the world's greatest challenge. Maybe we need to rethink society in terms of changing our expectations. Not just working longer, but the idea that you have two, three or four careers."
Coughlin is 58 and already, "I get the little paper from MIT showing my first possible retirement date," he says. "I get a little chilled."
He'll be all right, surely? With every passing year he must be getting more and more qualified to be head of the AgeLab.
"Yeah. My retirement plan is, feet first."
Does he ever put on Agnes?
I have," he says. When you're wearing Agnes, "You'll fight against the restrictions. In fact, if there is any truth to the 'crabby old man', they're not crabby at you or life. It's because inside every old person is a young person who remembers what it was to be young, or is still young in their head, but the original equipment is failing."
Is it frightening to wear it?
He shrugs. "I have yet to see anyone who was not thrilled that the exercise was over."
Samantha Brady, a research specialist at the lab, arrives at this point carrying a large bag, which contains one of the ageing suits.
"We're going to start with the weighted vest," she says, kneeling on the floor to unpack it. "This is to simulate muscle loss."
She looks very young. I ask her how much experience she has doing this to people, vaguely aware that I already sound like an old man eyeing the young doctor and demanding her credentials. I want to know her age too.
"This is a police report, right?" says Brady.
Well, she's 29. She has been making people feel old for about three and a half years.
"I feel for the person putting it on. It's pretty tiring" she says.
I get into the jumpsuit, then she attaches more weights and bungee cords that run down my hamstrings and connect to the heels of large plastic sandals I'm now wearing. They have a foam pad beneath them. "That puts you off-balance on the floor a little bit, but also it reduces your tactile sensation," says Brady. "So actually feeling the steps you're taking, it takes a little more mental energy."
I think of my father-in-law, who is 83 and has neuropathy, which steadily causes loss of feeling in the hands and feet. He told me about it once when we were out in the car, and I felt bad for him, and also very slightly nervous about the fact that he was driving.
I'm feeling quite nervous now too. I'd like to say that I faced the sudden onset of old age with calm fortitude, but really I spent most of the time wondering if I ought to have gone to the loo. It lies at the far end of the building, next to the lifts. Already it seems miles away.
The Times photographer looks concerned. He keeps wincing. I'm in a neck harness now that attaches to a helmet, stiffening my neck and bending my spine.
"It kind of leans you over a bit," says Brady.
Being old, apparently, is like carrying two small children all the time.
Driving's worse. I cut corners and keep veering onto the pavement. It's like a geriatric Grand Theft Auto.
Brady puts braces on my knees and straps weights to my wrists and ankles. Weighted gloves of a coarse material simulate arthritis in the hands and a loss of touch in the fingertips.
"This isn't the healthiest version of what an older adult would feel," says Brady. "This is someone with a couple of chronic conditions."
Now come the goggles, the final part of the suit. The world turns yellow. The faces of the director and young Brady blur and shift as I try to focus on them. "You look like you're feeling a little …" says the photographer. I must look bad because he tails off.
"I am!" I say. I need the seal.
Brady sets me a few tasks like sitting on a chair and bending to pick up a shoe. Then we shuffle down the corridor to visit Miss Daisy, the lab's driving simulator. It's a glass room in the centre of which is a red Volkswagen.
"We did it by sneaking the car into the lift shaft on a Saturday morning," says Coughlin. There's a photograph of this in an adjoining office. "I saw my career going before my eyes, thinking if that thing got trapped there, I'd be cooked," he says. But he'd been given the space temporarily, and once the car was in, it was hard for anyone to move it.
The front of the car is bracketed by three massive screens that show the road ahead. Behind it, another giant screen displays what's behind you. "It's a $4 million video game," says Coughlin. The car is rigged with sensors: sweat sensors and pulse detectors on the steering wheel, cameras on the dashboard that track your eye movements. The point of it is to test how new pieces of technology work for older drivers. It's not intended for people wearing the ageing suit. I get in anyway after some light swearing. The seat is too far forward and I can't bend my legs. Once in, I have the distinct impression that I am never getting out – that, like the car, I'll be here for ever.
There must be a way to adjust the seat. I can't really look down, but after a while groping down the gap between my seat and the door, which feels too damn small, my fingers touch a tiny plastic nub and the seat shifts backwards.
It doesn't sound like much now, but at the time the whole effort seems heroic. I feel like an astronaut in a tumbling capsule, reaching for a switch. It is better, anyway, than the driving that follows, in which I squint at the road ahead and keep cutting corners and veering onto the pavement, like a player in a geriatric version of Grand Theft Auto.
Afterwards, I feel rather sick. Brady brings me a drink. I worry that I have inadvertently started to treat her as my carer.
"Well, you're grandpa," she replies. We're going outside and she wants me to put some plastic covers over my sandals to stop the foam pads beneath them catching on the pavement. "Actually, you can try to put these on," she says.
It's hard. I have tight hamstrings, even without the suit.
Pavements are not what they were, I'll tell you that. I remember them as they used to be in the old days, before I put on this suit. They're precarious places now. Someone should do something.
I cross the road and climb the steps towards a plaza. It seems as if we have covered a great distance in crossing the road. It reminds me of something Martin Amis said about getting older. I interviewed him a year ago and he talked of walking to the shops from his apartment, coming around a corner and thinking, that's a long way. The distances, to the eye, look really formidable, daunting.
He said his body felt slower and jerkier. "I have far more spillages and f***-ups just in daily life, at home, by over-reacting," he said. "If you see something wobbling, your hand shoots out and knocks over about 15 things."
He wasn't in my condition. He was only 69, but there's something to it. Back inside, after a pause to catch my breath, we go to the kitchen where everyone says I should make a coffee.
I squint at the symbols on the coffee machine and then at the capsules it takes. When it is made, I have some trouble lifting it to my lips. It feels as if I am working out.
I have an odd impulse now, to fight the machine. I pick up three capsules and juggle them. It's hard in the gloves, but I manage it for a bit. People congratulate me, but I feel self-conscious, like an old man doing handstands on a beach to show everyone he's still got it.
Taking off the suit, it's like coming up from the deep. Coughlin thinks there might be a study to be done on people's relieved reactions as they return from old age and find they can move easily through the world once more. "When you are young, you are busy absorbing the world outside," he says. "The suit makes you much more focused on your physical self."
Dashing outside afterwards to catch a train, I marvel at how near and easy everything is, but some vestiges of the suit linger. At an underground station I blunder onto the wrong platform. Running back around, I bump into a young construction worker, who gestures politely for me to go ahead of him. But now I have no money left on my railcard, and there are no ticket machines. "Come in with me," the young man says, buzzing us both through the turnstile together. He nods and smiles, and then vaults lightly onto a tall steel box against the wall of the platform and sits on top of it, looking at his phone. I feel a surge of gratitude, charged up with something stronger: a fond nostalgia for the time when I was 20, as I often think I still am. The sad realisation that I am not has been rammed home, I suppose, by the experience of being 80. In any case, I keep thinking, what a nice young man.
Two days later, I am cycling through Manhattan when a face pops into my head: a cheery, engaging sort of face, with soulful dark eyes. And I think, God, I really miss that seal.
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London
