Design and empathy in health care
The Let’s Talk Health Care blog pointed me to this NY Times story about Xtreme Aging, a program “designed to simulate the diminished abilities associated with old age.”
As the Times‘s John Leland explains, participants don distorting glasses to cloud their vision. They stuff cotton balls in their ears to dampen their hearing and in their nose to limit their sense of smell. They “put kernels of corn in their shoes to approximate the aches that come from losing fatty tissue.” And they slip on special gloves to limit their dexterity.
“As the population in the developing world ages,” the story says, “simulation programs like Xtreme Aging have become a regular part of many nursing or medical school curriculums, and have crept into the corporate world, where knowing what it is like to be elderly increasingly means better understanding one’s customers or even employees — how to design signs or instrument panels, how to make devices more usable.”
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