hand signing form.

Legal Preparedness for Aging and Caregiving

By Sharona Hoffman

During 2013 and 2014, I endured a very difficult 18 months. Both of my parents died, my mother-in-law died, and my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 55. As I went through all of this, I learned a great deal about getting older, getting sick, facing the end of life, and caregiving. As a result of my personal experiences and my professional background as a Professor of Law and Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, I wrote a book called Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow.

The book addresses many legal, financial, medical, social, and other support systems for aging and caregiving. In this article, I discuss the legal documents that every American adult should have. These documents can help ensure that your finances and health care are well-managed as you age and that your wishes will be followed after death.

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Physical therapist helps person in wheelchair.

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Changed Caregiver Education and Training

By Elizabeth Hansen

As a Physical Therapy Practice Leader, I help patients at the rehabilitation level of care — patients who have sustained a significant injury or disease that has life-changing implications.

Caregivers play an important role in the discharge of these patients from the in-patient context back to the home. They take on the burden of learning the techniques and interventions recommended by the clinical team. They may be learning how to use and maintain new equipment, such as power wheelchairs, feeding tubes, and lifts.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I have noticed increased distress among both health care providers and family caregivers as patients are getting ready to discharge home, due in large part to challenges posed by the pandemic to family health care education.

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“Siri, Should Robots Give Care?”

By Gali Katznelson

Having finally watched the movie Her, I may very well be committing the “Hollywood Scenarios” deadly sin by embarking on this post. This is one of the seven deadly sins of people who sensationalize artificial intelligence (AI), proposed by Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Alas, without spoiling the movie Her (you should watch it), it’s easy for me to conceptualize a world in which machines can be trained to mimic a caring relationship and provide emotional support. This is because, in some ways, it’s already happening.

There are the familiar voice assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, to which people may be turning for health support. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016 found that that the responses of smartphone assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Samsung’s S Voice to mental and physical health concerns were often inadequate. Telling Siri about sexual abuse elicited the response, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’” Telling Samsung’s S Voice you wanted to commit suicide led to the perhaps not-so-sensitive response, “Don’t you dare hurt yourself.” This technology proved far from perfect in providing salient guidance. However, since this study came out over a year ago, programmers behind Siri and S Voice have remedied these issues by providing more appropriate responses, such as counseling hotline information.

An AI specifically trained to provide helpful responses to mental health issues is Tess, “a psychological AI that administers highly personalized psychotherapy, psycho-education, and health-related reminders, on-demand, when and where the mental health professional isn’t.” X2AI, the company behind Tess, is in the process of finalizing an official Board of Ethics, and for good reason. The ethical considerations of an artificially intelligent therapist are rampant, from privacy and security issues to the potential for delivering misguided information that could cost lives. Read More