Innovate for the Tech Boom(ers): Why Gen Z Should Do More to Develop Technology for the Elderly

When my grandparents got the call that I was born on December 5, 2009, they packed up their lives, got on the first plane from Inner Mongolia to New York City, and moved in to help my mom raise me. They’ve been living with us ever since. Every day, from Pre-K to sixth grade, my grandpa would take the subway with me to school and back, and I would come home to a hot dish of my Grandma’s tomato and egg stir-fry.

But as I got older, I started to realize that life wasn’t so easy for them. While I was either buried in homework or meeting up with friends, my grandparents sat at home, only leaving our apartment during the weekends to buy groceries in Flushing. Over time, these outings started to become even less frequent, due to my grandma’s chronic back pain and my grandpa’s Alzheimer’s.

Seeing my grandparents’ struggles inspired me to harness my experience in AI and robotics to start the online platform Techable, which aims to improve older adults’ quality of life by providing a highly personalized AI companion, announcing events at local senior centers, and automating various government benefit forms. This August, Techable partnered with Self-Help for the Elderly, one of the biggest senior centers in the United States, to reach over 50,000 seniors.

Techable has shown me first-hand how powerful of an impact my generation can have on older adults. But as I look at people my age, it seems like most Gen Z Americans are more focused on innovating social media-synced AI glasses, romantasy bots, and virtual reality sets. That’s despite elderly tech being one of the most untapped sectors of the AI market—and Gen Z being uniquely positioned to innovate in the space. That’s why it’s high time for my generation to start innovating for the tech boom(ers)!

First of all, at least some of what has likely deterred Gen Z from innovating for the elderly population can likely be chalked up to the long-standing preconception that seniors aren’t as familiar with technology. Many young people like me have grandparents that don’t know how to send texts on their iPhone or maybe even make a call. But as more tech savvy people age into retirement, seniors are becoming more familiar with technology; already, 66% of Americans aged fifty or older say that using technology makes their lives easier. And if we make technologies that are accessible and easy to use, then a lack of tech expertise shouldn’t even be a barrier.

Secondly, as innovators, we’re primed to tackle the problems closest to us. Gen Z wants to innovate for Gen Z—developing the next solution for social media dependence, mental health struggles, you name it. But there’s actually quite a bit of overlap in the problems Gen Z and seniors face, the loneliness epidemic being the most obvious example. A study conducted in November 2024 reveals 80% of Gen Z respondents globally reported feelings of loneliness in the past 12 months, making Gen Z uniquely equipped to rework technology into something that fosters connection rather than loneliness—for people our age, but also for seniors. Sure, there are other problems seniors face that Gen Z might not even be aware of, partly due to a lack of exposure. Intergenerational households like my own are, after all, a rarity in the US, and many elderly people live either alone or in senior homes. But the country’s densest urban innovation hubs still have large local senior populations that Gen Z could tap into for product development and testing, facilitating intergenerational connection along the way.

Finally, the 60-million-strong senior population in the US is expected to grow by 3% annually, and the caretaking resources we have in place can’t keep up. The well-documented national caretaking shortage is projected to increase to 151,000 missing caregivers by 2030 and 355,000 by 2040, showing how direly we need to come up with more innovative ways to provide companionship, care and assistance to the elderly. AI can help meet that gap, but the offerings currently in place don’t service the elderly market particularly well: Alexa and Google Home can turn the lights off and on but it can’t help seniors with administrative tasks. And more companionship-oriented robots like Jibo and ElliQ have been either too expensive or too clunky, and thus haven’t been widely implemented at senior centers or homes. (Jibo, in fact, failed out of the market.) This space offers huge economic potential and little existing effective contributions—and given their experience with technology, Gen Z innovators don’t even have to be robotics experts or experienced coders to get involved. The rewards might be plentiful: the global elderly care market size was estimated to be valued at $1.5 trillion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 9.1% from 2025 to 2032.

Increasing physical ailments, lack of elderly care, and growing societal isolation—getting old indeed isn’t so easy. Perhaps the strongest reason why people of my generation should innovate in this space is that, like it or not, we’re all going to get there ourselves one day. Right now, we’re still in a position to leverage our experience with technology to help ease those difficulties. And while the problems we face when we’re seniors may be different from the problems seniors face today, our inventions could lay the groundwork for an innovation pipeline long into the future, so the generations after us will keep the advances in elderly tech coming. By innovating for our elders, we might just end up making things easier for ourselves too.

Jessica Wang is a senior at Trinity School in New York City and the founder of Techable, an AI platform designed to improve quality of life for the elderly.