Over the next few weeks I'll be winding down Age Friendly Futures. The work continues — I'm just moving it into a new home, Ageing Reframed, an initiative I'm building with the Multicultural Communities Council of South Australia (MCCSA).

It's the project I've been wanting to build for a while. Same territory — innovation in ageing and aged care — but with more room: a weekly newsletter, webinars and collaborations with industry experts, researchers and sector partners, and a focus on inclusion by design.

Because it's a new newsletter under MCCSA, your subscription needs to come from you rather than from me. If you'd like to be there for the first issue, register below. As before, all it takes is your email address, no other personal details.

This isn't the launch — that follows in a few weeks, and I'll send a reminder or two before Age Friendly Futures winds down. Registering now is the surest way to be in from the start.

Thank you.

In a study that brushed the forearms of people aged 13 to 82, the older someone was, the more pleasant they rated a slow, soft stroke — and the more emotional words they reached for to describe it.

Skin runs two touch systems. One is fast and precise — it reads texture, edges and pressure, the touch you use to do up a button or find a splinter. The other is slow, tuned to a light stroke at about the speed of a caress, and it runs to the emotional parts of the brain.

The fast system wears down with age. Receptors thin out, and fine touch gets less reliable. The slow one holds up, so the channel that carries the feeling of being held stays open.

Most of the touch a person gets in care runs through the first system. Washing, dressing, a hand under an arm to move someone safely, a cuff on the forearm. The other kind asks for something that cannot be rostered: a hand that rests for a moment and isn't doing anything else.

Often, touch is probably one of the channels that still works well, as sight, hearing and speech fade sooner. In my experience the sector does this well in practice, thanks to stuff that are naturally empathetic. The difficulty of course is that this kind of touch lives outside what gets counted, and time is the scarce thing.

The reframe is a small one. The contact that already happens — the hand on the shoulder that lingers a second past the task — lands on a sense that stays keen late in life. [Relevant research here (1), here (2), and here (3)]

Tuesday 28 July | 2–4.30pm AEST | Online | Ticketed

I'm running this workshop with Ageing Australia, building on the June webinar on AI in aged care. The session covers Tier 2 and Tier 3 of AI adoption — the structured phase that comes after Tier 1, where generic tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot are already in everyday use across the sector.

Hands-on walkthroughs of five practical tools — AI Use Case Discovery, Value Assessment, Ethics Assessment, Risk Assessment, and a Prioritisation Roadmap. Governance and oversight considerations through the back half. For executives, operational managers and anyone moving their organisation past individual experimentation.

Wednesday 5 August | 9am–5pm AEST | Establishment Ballroom, Sydney | Ticketed

A one-day forum for NDIS and aged care providers on where AI and automation are landing in day-to-day operations — rostering, compliance, intake, payroll — and where they're still rough. Hosted by Tania Gomez Consulting, the program runs across VR for dementia, AI governance, short tech showcases from a range of vendors, and a CEO roundtable to close. I'm speaking on the future of care.

You can read more here. Registering through the link below takes 20% off. 👇

The Chinese tech platform Huxiu ran a closed-door session with founders and investors building companion robots — the desktop bots for kids, elder-care terminals, AI pets, and "bionic lovers." What they found was that plenty of these products get admired on day one and sit unused by day 30; for some, returns run close to 30%. (read it here, translated from Chinese, if the link breaks, here is the original)

The AI models can talk, and they keep getting cheaper. What's hard is giving someone a reason to keep switching the companion robot on. Older users buy a clear function — health checks, medication reminders, a consultation — more readily than companionship on its own.

The products I expect to last are the ones that solve a narrow problem and know when to stay quiet. And there is also the issue of “pseudo-empathy", as described by one of the developers in the article. A bot will only say "I understand you" so many times, until the user reads it as hollow.

Americans are spending less time socialising

Axios, from the latest American Time Use Survey, reports that time spent socialising has fallen from about 45 minutes a day to 35 over twenty years. (read it here) Part of it is phones and the shift to remote everything. Part of it is that home got more comfortable — bigger screens, dinner delivered. And part of it is the closing of gathering places: libraries, coffee shops, churches, museums.

Cycling Without Age puts an older person in the front seat of a trishaw — a bike with a two-seat bench up front — and a volunteer pedals them out into their old neighbourhood, free, with the rider up front where they can talk and be seen. It began in Copenhagen in 2012 and runs in around fifty countries now. Ole Kassow, who started it, calls the volunteers "pilots"; the ride is really the hour out in the world and the conversation along the way. (read it here)

Its motto — "the right to wind in your hair" — came from a blind woman, who told him she couldn't see any more, but could still smell the flowers, hear the birds, and feel the wind in her hair.

AI tools often answer a slightly different question from the one you asked — and answer it accurately, so nothing feels wrong. Ask for "an essay on the French Revolution" and the model picks a length, a reading level and a tone, then writes.

Paste this at the end of your prompt: "Before you answer, tell me what you need to know to answer well, and point out any assumptions you'd otherwise make."

It comes back with the decisions it was about to make for you — how long, who it's for, how formal, whether to cite sources — and you make them yourself before a word gets written.

Each week, I review developments in ageing and aged care and what they mean in practice. If this was useful, forward it to someone in the sector who'd appreciate it.

George Gouzounis