This past Christmas, I helped my parents choose a water filter. The latest “smart” models all came with a smartphone app that promised to monitor filter life, track water quality and automatically request service. Yet my father, age 75, and mother, 67, were quick to reject them in favor of a nondigital model.
“Every time it updates or I forget how to use it, we’ll have to call you,” my dad said.
As an only child living 8,000 miles away, I didn’t need convincing. My parents are aging in place and don’t need traditional caregiving — they cook, drive and manage their home just fine. Instead, I provide what I call technology caregiving: helping them with their digital activities of daily living, such as online banking or booking theater tickets.
But as the tech industry shifts toward artificial intelligence agents and generative user interfaces — promising to make devices smarter than ever — I am bracing for this invisible workload to become heavier, not lighter. I know this not just because I’m a caregiver for aging parents, but through my job as a computer scientist studying human-computer interaction.
Technology caregiving
Technology caregiving is the act of helping someone use digital tools. While this isn’t entirely new — people have long helped grandparents program VCRs and connect parents’ desktop computers to the internet — the stakes have changed.
Today, digitization is ubiquitous. Helping with these tools is no longer just occasional unpaid tech support; it is a form of continuous caregiving essential for maintaining independence. For example, even the simple act of clipping coupons has gone digital, marginalizing older adults who are unable to navigate store apps to access these discounts.
People often view older adults as resistant to technology, but recent years — particularly since the covid-19 pandemic — have shattered that myth. Many older adults are now online and willing to use these tools, but they require frequent help from family, friends or communities.
The innovation tax
The problem isn’t just that devices and apps are getting complex; it’s that they are constantly changing. Frequent software updates and shifting interfaces can be frustrating for all users, but they turn familiar tools into foreign concepts for older adults.
This unpredictability is about to accelerate. Take generative user interfaces, which designers can use to dynamically generate an interface in minutes. Pair them with AI agents, and the system can assume the designer’s role, taking independent actions based on how it perceives a user’s intent or need.
If the “Pay Bill” button is in a different place every third time you open a particular app because an AI decided to optimize the interface, you might feel perpetually incompetent if you can’t quickly locate it. While the industry calls this personalization, for an older adult, it is a moving target.
This relentless pace of change, even when intended to be helpful, is directly at odds with age-related cognitive changes. And this dynamic is continuing with the new generation of seniors. They may be more eager to adopt new tools than the last, but wanting to use technology is not the same as being able to use it when the rules are constantly changing.
To navigate a brand-new or shifting interface, your brain relies on fluid intelligence: the ability to reason, solve novel problems and ignore distractions on the fly. Unlike the knowledge that people accumulate over time, fluid intelligence naturally declines with age.
When an app updates or an AI optimizes a layout, it forces the user to discard their hard-won mental models and start over. For an older adult, this isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it is a taxing job for their working memory.
As an older adult participant in a study my colleagues and I conducted put it:
“I had a computer on my desk in 1980, OK, when nobody else did. So this is not a foreign language, but the changes that are made with little to no explanation and then things that you knew how to do have either changed or disappeared completely, that is the stuff that absolutely drives me, and I will tell you, every other older adult in America nuts.”
Help the helper
I believe that the way forward is to stop treating tech support as an afterthought and start designing for the technology caregiver. Digital literacy training for seniors and encouraging designing technologies for all users are important but not enough; it’s important to build tools that share the burden.
Two promising paths are emerging. First, cognitive accessibility features such as AI assistants that find buried buttons or provide real-time tech support can off-load tasks from the caregiver. Second, tools for caregivers are beginning to move beyond simply controlling device feature access to capabilities such as allowing authorized access for banking as co-users, or recording personalized instructions.
These tools will also need to be tailored: Family caregivers need different tools than community helpers such as libraries and senior centers.
In the age of AI, innovation shouldn’t be a tax on the aging brain. It should help bridge the digital divide.
Debaleena Chattopadhyay is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Chicago. This article was produced in collaboration with the Conversation, a nonprofit news organization.
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