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Age Simulation Suit
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- dmcq2 1y agoWell I dont think I need all that equipment to experience the effect. So I can save myself the money, yay!
- GratiaTerra 1y agoGeriatric simulation is interesting, but couldn't this also be applied to pediatric simulation for improved vision, hearing, strength and endurance? I don't see any show stoppers preventing the development of a youth-augmentation exosuit blending AR sensory augmentation, powered exoskeleton support, haptics, and AI adaptive controls.
- Stevvo 1y agoI think you're missing the point. You use something like this to help in design/testing of accessible spaces. An exosuit can't cut you half to help you make better children's spaces.
- GuB-42 1y ago> An exosuit can't cut you half But you can build a room twice as big. We are straying away from the exosuit idea though.
- GratiaTerra 1y agoFloating the idea of a youth simulator (like a VR app with integrated exosuit) could be used to measure physiological and cognitive age gaps. It might be valuable for science and medicine, but also for things like understanding empathy/social knowledge or understanding workflows/applied knowledge.
- nonameiguess 1y agoAdditionally, assuming you're not already geriatric, simulating it is the only way to experience it short of waiting. If you're an adult, you were already a kid at some point.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoJust spitballing: - Powered exoskeletons aren't quite "there" - If moving at all is painful, having an exoskeleton move you will also be painful - Haptics and AR aren't quite there either - Batteries, it's always batteries
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago> For many years our age simulation suit GERT has been by far the most popular product worldwide. GERT: Bigger than the iPhone.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoI'd be more interested in the other way around
- OptionOfT 1y agoMy initial thoughts too.
- ilc 1y agoAmen.
- ge96 1y agoUse it to make yourself stronger, break free like the running man in Animatrix
- libria 1y agoYeah, clickbait title for some of us. Should be "Advanced Age Simulation Suit".
- paulpauper 1y agolosing weight is one way
- xunil2ycom 1y agoI could have used this about 40 years ago.
- nate 1y agoMy dad is 85 and this article hits hard about what he fights going on in his body. What sucks is how much of a downward, self reinforcing spiral it all is. It's so hard to see the curbs to walk over or how to get to a thing himself, so he just naturally chooses to do fewer and fewer things. Watching TV is safer and kinder and becomes the default to anything. Which just makes his brain less and less stimulated and active, and you can imagine the drag that adds to keep figuring out life. But like the empathy found in this article, it's caused me to be incredibly more patient with anyone struggling to walk in front of me on a crowded or narrow sidewalk. Aging is rough. Thank you to everyone working on accessibility and aging related tech and science.
- gowld 1y agoWhen you stop walking, that's the beginning of the end.
- bayesnet 1y agoMy grandfather, with whom I was very close, suffered from Parkinson's in his last decade or so. For a long time he was doing OK: Occasional confusion and the slow, shuffling walk that is characteristic of the disease. One day he had a minor operation that left him needing a wheelchair for what we thought would be just a few weeks. But he never regained his strength and was never to walk again, which led to a steep and sudden decline in his mental condition. It was truly devastating to see one of the sharpest people I knew become an angry and confused simulacrum of the man I so admired. I wish I had realized two things then: First, as you say, maintaining mobility is the crucial to the well-being of the elderly. Second, immediate physical/occupational therapy after a fall or surgery is essential to people at risk of losing mobility. Sadly it wasn't offered to us and we didn't think to ask.
- hnhnhnaccount 1y agoMy dad is going through that shit right now. He fell a few weeks ago and hasn’t walked since. I live abroad to make more money and feed my ego and I only see him 3–4 times a year. On top of that selfishness, every now and then I catch myself selfishly thinking I don’t want to go through that, which makes me feel like an even worst piece of shit. Life sucks.
- EZ-Cheeze 1y agoIf you want to see what you will look like when you're older, stand in a spot and jump up and down repeatedly. Take photos (or pause a video recording) right at the moment after the lowest part of your jump. The upward acceleration will make your skin sag the way gravity will as your collagen weakens over decades. But then again, by the time you're older you might look younger than you do now, e.g. "Ageing changes our genes – epigenetic atlas gives clearest picture yet (nature.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095532 (from the other day, no comments yet)
- ge96 1y agoOr watch someone pull G forces in a plane (sim here but I had another vid in mind this one is better) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/m3wljWlAVss https://www.youtube.com/shorts/m3wljWlAVss
- languagehacker 1y agoFinally I can be Karl Havoc
- clcaev 1y agoAlternatively, one might ask someone with those disabilities to provide feedback.
- trhway 1y agoWhile i think we should do more things in that direction, it borders on human experimentation. Btw, somebody should mention that Putin/Xi's talk about living to 150 years and the 70 being just a children age today (if you have state resources at your disposal).
- a2128 1y agoI think life extension is an age-old topic for every powerful monarch or authoritarian leader. Every one believes they'll at last be the one who has the right resources and people to finally cheat life and live to 150 or become immortal. If they really end up buying into immortality it usually leads to their demise, like what happened to so many Chinese emperors throughout history. New knowledge and new theories about aging always arise but so does new quackery from people who have a lot to gain from convincing powerful people. Yesterday it was immortality elixirs that lead to mercury poisioning, today it's young blood transfusions and young organ transplants (having multiple major surgeries and living on lifelong immunosuppresants does not bode well for longevity)
- shikon7 1y agoI'm still waiting for the youth simulation suit.
- sans_souse 1y agoUnderrated comment!
- bitwize 1y agoLooks like Harrison Bergeron's gear, which means it's probably well suited to purpose.
- ourmandave 1y agoDoes it also simulate out living your friends and spouse and being alone?
- dhosek 1y agoI think if you walk around in one of those, your friends and spouse will abandon you pretty quickly.
- HSO 1y agoOne thing you have to experience to really get it, that cannot be simulated with a mechanical suit or transmitted through words, is all the f-ing little aches you get past a certain point. I´m now convinced it is this that makes older people cranky. Some days, my body is just constantly in a low but annoying pain somewhere, and it seems in increasingly weird, obscure places you never even thought about. I dont even remember when or how it started but although I would be considered fit by most people, now I have to watch my running, otherwise ITBS, I have to watch my pull exercises, otherwise shoulder impingement syndrome, I have to watch my dips, otherwise elbows, hell even after just _sleeping_ I have to roll and stretch my neck out because it hurts just from lying apparently. I used to scoff about warmup, now I take it really, really seriously. "Going with the flow" of the moment, instead of sticking to a carefully dosed plan? That´s for young bodies! Thankfully I can still use my full range of motion everywhere but Im acutely aware now how quickly it can all go away and how long any overuse or even minor injury now costs me in recovery. Getting older has its benefits too but mostly mental, in physical terms I cannot think of a single benefit.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoHow old are you?
- BubbleRings 1y agoAnd how much caffeine do you drink?
- tempestn 1y agoI'm not the parent, but could've written all the same (44).
- IAmGraydon 1y agoI’m 43, and though I seem to get more injuries in the gym since I hit 40 (usually tendon overuse), I’ve noticed that proper nutrition and good sleep make a big difference in how my body feels. I also go to the gym at 5:30am and do an hour of free weight strength training 4 days per week. If you guys are hurting all the time in your 40s, I would really advise you to do a full assessment of what you’re putting in your body and what kind of message you’re sending your body with your exercise routine. It might also be a good idea to get checked for markers of inflammation as well as testosterone levels. You should not have constant nagging pain at your age.
- eweise 1y agotoo bad it can't make my 60 year old body simulate a 20 year old.
- digitalsushi 1y agoYou joke but given the rate of progress, in a few more years, who knows what they'll come up with. It won't be real. Oh no. But just being fooled for a few minutes is the first flavorful bite. The pragmatist in me hopes not, I think it'll be the worst drug we invent, even if it's just a pair of goggles, a glove, and a weird sticker for the temples. But I expect it. Silver lining?
- aitium12 1y ago[dead]
- jkestner 1y agoOne of my professors in undergrad pioneered research into the eldery’s interaction with the world. Not just the physiological, but sociological aspects — she got a makeup artist to disguise herself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Moore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Moore
- steve918 1y agoIf you preorder I can get you the same thing for half the price. It just sometimes takes a few years for delivery.
- dsign 1y agoAwful idea #1: If you are one of those advanced-age president-dictator of a big super-power, you know, one of those guys that get caught in a hot mic talking about immortality, you could seal your pact with the devil by forcing anybody in your big chunk of the planet who doesn’t ace their STEM topics to wear one of these suits. Who knows, maybe if the youth get properly scared of their old age, they will stop being a subversive thorn and instead focus on fixing the ending of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Awful idea #2: Just listen to your grandmother when you are young. She will tell you how brutal is to be old. Read the science, not just biology but all the connected sciences, specially mathematics. And then listen to the priests (critically!), and read the writers, and peruse the written record of the human civilization, which almost begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh. It will reveal shadows you didn’t know were in your mind. None of it, of course, prevents you from becoming old, but it puts most things into perspective, and it digs out a certain light that we have lost and which we very much need if we are ever going to do anything about the suffering that aging brings. Awful idea #3: Take a shortcut and paste everything I wrote before this paragraph into an LLM. Any LLM which is reasonably state of the art. Prompt with “what’s the meaning of this?” It will significantly change the intended meaning of what I said in “awful idea #2”. That’s the bias/zeitgeist in our vast cultural recent corpus, that the LLMs swallowed for training, being regurgitated at you in condensed form. And they said that LLMs aren’t useful! Repeat the experiment, but this time use Simplified Chinese to prompt. Observe the very slight cultural drift. Meditate. Now abandon this shortcut and execute awful idea #2. Borrow somebody else’s grandmother if you must.
- greyb 1y agoFrom what I recall, there are retirement homes (the examples I'm thinking of are in Asia) that make use of these suits in their onboarding processes, where they need to wear these suits for a few hours to understand some of the challenges their patients experience, and develop empathy when they can't walk as fast or do things that we'd expect in short order. I would love to see more widespread adoption of these suits in training and employee onboarding in these facilities, mostly because if I'm in that situation or I want to think about a retirement home for my family members, I'd want to see that no one is losing their temper because my mom can't sprint 12km/hr to the elevators for breakfast. This being said, anecdotally, it seems elder abuse is more the norm, simply because of compassion fatigue, so I suspect that even in however many years time, I'll be punched by a PSW for no good reason.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- sniffers 1y agoDoing this is probably a net good but also a bit risky. It creates the impression that there's one experience we all go through as we decline, when in reality it's pretty wildly different. It's helpful to build some empathy, but also a limited understanding. For instance, these suits might restrict movement but they don't simulate hip or knee pain. They don't simulate shortness of breath, etc. It certainly doesn't induce cognitive impairment or anxiety. A young healthy person might wear one of these and go, "it's not soooooo bad.... I could do it why can't they".
- beezlewax 1y agoI tried on an obesity simulation suit once. It was designed for caregivers - with the goal of increasing empathy in mind. It was amazing how difficult ordinary tasks were.
- paulpauper 1y agoyeah that is because the weight was sudden and you were not acclimated to it.
- hollerith 1y agoMost German thing ever (for post-WWII version of "German").
- levzettelin 1y agoAs a German, that's exactly what I was thinking lololol
- coldcode 1y agoThe site is slow so I can't see it. I'm 68, eat well, lost 20 pounds, work out twice a week. Everything is working fine. But I live in a place surrounded by people in walkers, wheelchairs, or using canes. Some of them have had strokes or accidents making improvement hard, but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging. You don't ordinarily wind up with a walker at a single point; it often starts many years or even decades earlier when you failed to keep in decent physical shape. I almost started too late (last couple of years), I can see how easy it is to not notice your physical being slowly going down. But assuming no major injury or disease, you can improve your body at almost any age, a little at a time, and avoid or at least postpone physical aging for quite a while. I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune. I am still getting older, but I am in better shape than I was before I retired. The last time I felt as fit was when I was still playing basketball 30+ years ago. Don't wait, it's easier to do a little for decades than wait until it's almost too late.
- MontyCarloHall 1y ago>but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging Thank you for saying this. A depressingly large proportion of people are seemingly resigned to the fact that once you hit 40-50, you'll inevitably turn into an achy tub of lard and it's rapidly and irreversibly downhill from there. Barring injuries that are truly irreversible (e.g. severe damage to joints/cartilage), with the correct diet and fitness regime, it's entirely possible to remain lean (≤20% bodyfat) and muscular (≥80th percentile in strength standards [0]) well into what most consider "old age." So many people have no idea just how poorly they eat or how inactive and physically weak they are, and consider the result to just be a normal part of life. >I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune. Thanks for saying this too. So much cognitive decline is due to inactivity of the mind. My mom was whip smart until she retired in her mid-60s to a life of idle leisure, and her mental faculties noticeably deteriorated within a few months. Thankfully, she noticed this and deliberately re-engaged with more intense intellectual pursuits (including consulting part-time in the professional field that she loved), and the improvement was night-and-day. [0] https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards
- philipov 1y agoCan I get a suit that simulates being 20 years old again?
- ahartmetz 1y agoThe harder kinds of stimulants maybe?
- AdrianoKF 1y agoReminds me of the AGNES [0] (Age Gain Now Empathy System), developed at MIT AgeLab. Saw it in action there back when I worked at the lab in the early 10s - I found the broad range of applications in research quite intriguing. [0]: https://agelab.mit.edu/methods/agnes-age-gain-now-empathy-system https://agelab.mit.edu/methods/agnes-age-gain-now-empathy-sy...
- sans_souse 1y agoI guess I'm the only one who thought this was literally a joke. If anyone is interested I have the orange tinted 90's ski goggles, weights for arms and legs, and I'll even throw in some mothballs and baby powder no additional charge. Do people really need something this extravagant not too mention ridiculous looking in order to just relate to other humans? In order to empathize? Is it so hard to "take someone's word" for how they feel, that we need to feel it too? I've never had a Kidney Stone in my life, and I'm not signing up for one because I don't need to "see it to believe it." But if it sells I say Kudos to the creator. I'm just shocked there's a niche here.
- squigz 1y agoBecause there's a big difference between having empathy for another's pain and actually understanding what it's like, even to a slight degree. For example, I'm severely visually impaired; I would not expect a deaf person to truly understand what that's like, just as I don't understand what a deaf person's life is like; that doesn't stop either of us from having empathy for the other though. If this helps people empathize who otherwise wouldn't... isn't that good? Can we just not be glad that people can gain some more understanding of what the elderly go through?
- sans_souse 1y agoOk, I realize that came out as quite negative/sarcastic, not meant to offend anyone. I stand by the overall comment though. You don't have to have the extent of the experience another person has had to relate/empathize.
- sandworm101 1y agoThere is a flip side to these suits. They are meant to engender understanding and empathy. Occassionally, it goes wrong. Experience all the physical limitation and some come to the conclusion that old people should not be allowed to drive or operate anything that moves. (I once had my foot run over by an elderly person in very heavy electric wheelchair in a grocery store. If not for my steel toes, i would have been limping for months. That person was totally unable to control the machine, but what can you say? Better my boots than a kid in flipflops.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- meindnoch 1y agoThe opposite would be more useful for me.
- amelius 1y agoAlso simulates the loss of physical attractiveness.
- eth0up 1y agoTo my abstract, scifi inclined mind, this is the potential beginning to what I'd coin The Humble Suit: A suit that simulates a vast array of infirmities legitimately experienced by the muted, ignored, but equally entitled minority. In my fictional world, intelligence isn't an exclusive measurement of one's ability to exploit and exhibit usefulness for the system that owns them, but also includes understanding, empathy and awareness of aspects of reality beyond the exclusively immediately financially lucrative. In an era where reading and compassion is secondary to entertainment and profiteering, one could wear the suit to experience a temporary intermission of not being oneself as the pinnacle of reality. I do foresee challenges though, particularly with the probable result for many being the opposite of compassion, where one would dismiss the significance or challenges of, eg, being quadriplegic because they spent 20 minutes in the suit and have 'been there, done that'. Controlling for this outcome might require an advanced form of unknown technology. But if that could be wangled, we might have the means of creating additional nodes of compassion within our social machine that could keep the gears a bit more free of wailing meat. A practical result of this could be laughing less (see conservation of calories for utilitarians) at the guy with Parkinson's that's unloading your shopping cart into your luxury car, shaking in the rain, or something. There would definitely need to be built-in mitigation to steer the results away from self-righteousness and toward compassion though. Perhaps some time dilation and mushroom supplements could help.
- tasty_freeze 1y agoPeople are chiming in about the importance of diet and exercise to avoid (statistically) the decrepitude of old age. Another one I'll add is to use sunscreen and limiting sun exposure via hats and such. I'm in the southern US and my grandparents came from Ireland. I've never been a beech-goer, or tried to get a tan (not that it would really work anyway). When I was a kid, on the handful of times our family went to a beach for day, my brothers and I would end up with massive water blisters and we would have competitions to see who could pull the longest continuous strip of skin. I'm 61 now and my arms and back neck look like it -- loss of elasticity, spotted, any cuts on my arms produce scabs that take weeks to heal. But if you look at the skin on my upper arms, shoulders, or torso, which are nearly always covered by a shirt, you wouldn't be able to tell if I was 20 or 60. That skin is soft, pliable, and heals more quickly. I've had five basal cell carcinoma spots sliced off the back or nape of my neck so far. Use sunscreen.
- quesera 1y agoKurt Vonnegut, on the topics of youth, aging, and sunscreen: https://people.uncw.edu/schmidt/Index_files/Vonnegut/KVspeech.htm https://people.uncw.edu/schmidt/Index_files/Vonnegut/KVspeec...