Futuristic Suit Lets You Feel What It's Like To Be An Old Man

HughPickens.com writes: Andy Newman writes at the New York Times about an exhibit at Liberty Science Center in Jersey City that lets users walk a proverbial mile in their elders' orthopedic shoes and experience the stooped shuffle, the halting speech, and the dimming senses of an 85-year old man. It is not a very pleasant experience. An attendant cranks up a fader and your vision dissolves into melty, grayed-out blobs, like a memorably unvivid psychedelic experience, more knobs twiddle, and your hearing is subsumed in a fog of tinnitus, muffling and distortion. Loaded with hardware and a computer, the suit itself weighs 40 pounds, distributed as uncomfortably as possible. "It's going to get much worse," promises Bran Ferren, the suit's inventor. "You haven't lived."

According to Newman, in just 10 minutes, the aging suit induced a remarkable amount of frustration, depression and hopelessness. There are entire realms of wretchedness attendant upon owning and operating an 85-year-old body that the exhibit does not even touch upon. Comprehensive sagging, internal and external. Pain in places you did not know could hurt. Difficulty urinating. Difficulty not urinating. Watching your friends die off. Watching yourself become irrelevant, an object of pity or puzzlement if acknowledged at all. By allowing a younger generation to feel the effects of aging firsthand, the suit provides a newfound perspective that hopefully inspires a conversation with loved ones about getting older so, collectively, family and friends can better prepare for the future. If doing even the most basic tasks of daily living is this much trouble, you wonder, why bother? But it also makes you a little less likely to lose patience and a little more likely to feel empathy with the older people in your life. "My father, Aaron Newman, happens to be 85," says Newman. "I called him up. I described the treadmill experience and asked if that sounded about right." "No," he said. "It's much worse."

Comments

Re:B**Sht**

[bagboy]

Perhaps some genetics play into it, be he started walking 10+ miles a day at 60. At 49, I run a 5k in 22 minutes. I've been running for 8 years - I didn't start out at that. Do I have aches and pains? Yes. But far fewer than when I first started. Your body will inevitably break down, but lack of attention to it will accelerate that process.

Re:Aging sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Aging should be studied, understood, controlled and eventually reversed.

When I compare how people lived 100 years ago to today, I really do believe that it is possible that by 2116, we have solved this problem. When I look at the society of today, which is threatened by so many parties, I am not sure though whether society will be ready for it in 2116. It would mean lots of changes. We would need to start to adopt regulation of children, as place on earth is limited. What about life imprisonment? The concept of pensions in countries that regulate pensions needs to be thought over too, it can't be age based anymore. It can perhaps be that you have a 40/20 approach: work forty years, then enjoy 20 years without work, then work 40 years again, the ratio being changed depending on how much we need human workforce.

Aging is a very complex problem though, essentially every part of the body gives up or degrades its performance sooner or later. The key is probably when we find out how to grow human tissue/organs, then most general aging problems can be solved.

I doubt its not doable. My doubts are just whether society is ready for it, wants it, and is generally stable enough in the next 20-100 years to fund researchers finding out how to do it.

You unsensitive clods

[MrKaos]

Growing up as a geek, I was also really physical. I've played a life of physical sports, like hockey, soccer, football (touch in stead of tackle though), swimming, body surfing, hiking, hunting and climbing, fantastic stuff. Ironically it balances the mental effort I put into electronics and coding and I found I could focus really well.

My true love of physical activity has been Martial Arts. Throughout my 20's and 30's I did Thai boxing and during training the conditioning involved full power kicks and punches all over the body. When I was in my late 30's I could still do the splits, back flip and I was playing soccer when I snapped an achillies tendon, facing a wheel chair and cronic pain syndrome. It took almost three years to be able to walk again and significant determination to do so. I learned alot about physiotherapy and mental determination from sport was . Team sport were over for me, the balistic impacts were from other player. I was able to resume martial arts, currently BJJ, which is like physical chess, I love it. I got to competitition level, competed - only minor titles, but enough to test myself.

Over a decade later this activity has led to injuries all over the body that causes all sorts of aches and pains. Over the last couple of years (I diarise injuries) I noted that the *rate* of injuries progressing, recovery time longer. I was still training. My physical strength was still excellent and I'm able to fight guys 20-30 years younger, however I often noticed that strength could exceed my joints. Control was very important, pain was all over my body and, I noticed that I had pretty severe internal scarring accumulated in my muscles. Knots in my back so tight and painful that the physios elbow was into it and his feet were off the ground, and still I needed more pressure. Similar things around the rest of my body. I came to the conclusion that it was time to look at the state of my body.

I talked to my doctor who was surprised when I bought in my data that I had diarised and showed him some of the relationships I'd found, I was pressing him to authorize more physiotherapy. He did and with the assistance of another doctor and two physio therapists (both with Masters themselves who treat currently competing athletes) my body became a bit of an experiment. Dry needling is the main therapy used and over the past two years, I've stopped all training and physical activity and had over 4000 needles stuck into almost every muscle, joint and, tendon in my body. Sometimes 50 needles at a time.

That resulted in various odd and often very painful releases of scar tissue, intense periods of repeated joint cavitaion (cracking) in almost every joint in my body. Joints would go through periods of bone ossification and reform for weeks. One major event involved my left elbow. I was ashen grey, my left arm was numb and my chest constricted, but I wasn't having a heart attack. Instead my elbow released 10-20 degrees of movement, it swelled to almost the size of my knee down to my wrist in a session of 60-100 cavitations of the elbow over six hours. It was exhausting, I'm not sure if I was in shock, but I felt very ill for a few days. After that, I felt amazing, I had been carrying scarring from that injury (I broke my wrist in a fight once) for almost 20 years.

I'm almost at the end of this therapy, a process that uncovered 24 major injuries in my body each releasing with a intensity varying upto what I described above and currently the physios are trying to re-allign my hips, which will probably be the final and most painful cavitaion I've been slowly working up to.

I'm more physically out of shape than I have been because of intentional de-conditioning of the body however, I feel great. I'm middle aged now and I can still not only touch my toes, but stand on my fingers and I'm working my way back to doing the splits. A couple of weeks ago I woke up, got in the shower and realized there was no more pain. As a bonus, I'm also not as grumpy as I used to be and my mind is much cl