Xtreme Aging fast-forwards folks to 85

JOHN LELAND THE NEW YORK TIMES

COLUMBUS, Ohio - What does it feel like to be old in America? At the Westminster Thurber Retirement Community, Heather Ramirez summed it up in two words. “Painful,” she said. “Frustrating.”

Ramirez is only 33, but on a recent morning she was taking part in a three-hour training program called Xtreme Aging, designed to simulate the diminished abilities associated with old age.

Along with 15 colleagues and a reporter, Ramirez, a social worker at the facility, put on distorting glasses to blur her vision; stuffed cotton balls in her ears to reduce her hearing, and in her nose to dampen her sense of smell; and put on latex gloves with adhesive bands around the knuckles to impede her manual dexterity.Everyone put kernels of corn in their shoes to approximate the aches that come from losing fatty tissue.

They had become, in other words, virtual members of the 5.3 million Americans age 85 and older, the nation’s fastest-growing age group - the people the staff at the facility work with every day.

What a drag it is getting old, even if it’s just make-believe.

As the population in the developing world ages, 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.

With baby boomers edging into their 60s, engineers at Ford and other car companies have designed elaborate “age suits” that restrict movement and blur vision to approximate the effects of aging.

“I must say, you look lovely,” said Vicki Rosebrook, executive director of the Macklin Intergenerational Institute in Findlay, Ohio, which developed Xtreme Aging as a sensitivity training program for schools, churches, workplaces and other groups that have contact with the elderly.

Then Rosebrook put the group through a series of routine tasks, including buttoning a shirt, finding a number in a telephone book,dialing a cell phone and folding and unfolding a map. The result was a domestic obstacle course. Some tasks were difficult, some impossible. The type in the telephone book appeared microscopic, the buttons on the cell phone even smaller.

And forget about refolding a map or handling coins from a zippered wallet.

Rosebrook, 55, said she startedXtreme Aging three years ago after a teenage clerk at a hotel joked about her husband being a member of AARP. “We all started sharing experiences and realizing things that we perceived as discrimination,” she said.

She said she hoped to provide more training in the corporate world: at hotels or theme parks, at department stores or customer service centers.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 08/03/2008

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