This article is based on the A11yNYC talk by Tom Kamber, executive director of Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) from AARP. Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping older adults harness the power of technology to improve their quality of life and enhance their social and civic engagement.
Tom Kamber started OATS in 2004 when he worked in lower Manhattan, after 9/11. They were building a website to try to bring residents and businesses back into the community. Tom got a phone call from an 87-year-old woman who said, “I’m really interested in coming to this web launch party, but I don’t know what the web is, and I don’t know if I would feel welcome.”
It set off a bell to hear someone say they might not feel welcome at the event. Tom asked her name and encouraged her to find him at the end of the party and he would teach her whatever she needed to know. She comes, and one thing leads to another.
At 8 am on the next Monday morning, she shows up at Tom’s office for a volunteer tutoring session. “Pearl, this is the mouse. I want you to point at that button on the website and see if you can click on it,” Tom said.
She takes the mouse and takes it off the desk and starts pointing it. He tells her to put the mouse back down on the desk. This was a moment because it helped Tom understand that his framework wasn’t her framework. Tom’s generation of high school students was the first group that played Pong. The notion that you’re manipulating a mouse or something on your desk and you’re watching it on the screen was kind of second nature to him by 2004. But Pearl had never done that. She had never used a joystick in her life.
They worked together for about a year. She took off. She was founding a synagogue in lower Manhattan. She was harassing the local public officials by email. They were calling me and telling me to stop. He encouraged Pearl to keep it up.
Tom looked to see what other organizations were helping older people learn the technology ropes. There weren’t many. According to the technology adoption curve, older people tend to be on the backend of the adoption curve. In 2004, only 26% of people over 65 had ever been on the internet. This was about a third of the rate for younger people.
Collaborating with Users to Determine Their Needs
To address that, Tom started Older Adults Technology Services (OATS). The first thing that they did was a co-design. He didn’t know how to get something started, except to go talk to the target population. He met with different housing groups. They were almost all people over 60.
They wanted to work with Tom, but they weren’t sure how. He asked them what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to learn it. There were curriculums that showed people how to use the internet. But they are written by technology people. The first 50 pages were tips on how to resize your desktop icons, file management, and covering parts of the computer.
But none of it explained what the internet was and how to get email, the things people wanted to learn. They set up three-hour sessions once a week. But it was too much and they could not remember the details when they returned a week later. It was overwhelming.
They switched to 75-minute classes twice a week. Then they explored the cost of the classes. Many responded they were on fixed incomes. On top of learning the technology, they would need to buy a computer and pay for the internet. It was a lot. Thus, paying $20, $50, or $100 for a class was a barrier. Tom worked to offer the classes for free. They figured out a revenue model, coming from mostly non-profits that needed community programming.
OATS would show up and provide a tech program for seniors at centers. The people at the centers would write a small check of $15,000 for the summer. They would deliver a class. The program got off the ground with an adaptive curriculum focused on the basics that lasted 10 weeks. They had a 98% completion rate.
The curriculum was oriented around what people wanted to learn and people started building community out of that. The second level of curriculum they ended up teaching was workforce technology.
Tom asked people why they were there. And 60% of the people in the room said they were looking for jobs. Today the numbers have changed a bit. Partly because we’re working with a broader population out there. But it’s still between 10% and 30% of adults trying to get online are looking for some way to increase household revenue, whether it’s a job, entrepreneurship, gig economy, or managing finances. So, they focused on how people use tech for financial purposes.
That became a popular program. OATS started teaching all over New York City. Then, the second wave of federal funding hit. Every time there’s an economic crisis, the U.S. Department of Commerce gets excited about digital inclusion and decides to expand broadband in America as part of its stimulus program.
In 2008, there was an effort to build more stimulus efforts, and they increased broadband around the country. As part of those funding patterns, they added money for computer centers and technology training. For the first time, after they had started in 2004, almost ten years later, they had access to some federal dollars that might be able to give them resources.
The City of New York applied for the grant, with OATS as the sole partner. OATS put up all the matching funds because everything they did was match-eligible. They got the grant and opened their first-ever center for technology for older adults in 2013. It turned out, it’s the first technology-themed community center for older adults in America.
The Inspiration for “Senior Planet”
And instead of calling it the OATS center, they realized that people were coming to learn the technology, but they also wanted to connect to each other. They were taking a class, and they went to Tom saying they went to the OATS website and didn’t understand what to do with that. Thus, they needed a place for people to go online and created Senior Planet as a landing place for older people who wanted to do something cool.
Tom was listening to Hip Hop music like Fear of a Black Planet. He thought “Senior Planet” was empowering. The name and website were a resounding success. It wasn’t so much because the classes were interesting but more about what people did with them. Someone came up with a slogan: Aging with attitude. And that went right up on the wall. It kind of characterized what OATS was about.
It became about the amazing stories that were emerging. People starting businesses people finding old Army buddies from the Korean War and doing reunions and people writing memoirs and story events.
One guy wrote a musical performance, and it was before the movie came out. It was called The Green Book. Where people would go around the South and they couldn’t stay at regular hotels. He had experienced it. The African American guy wrote this musical about the experience and wanted to workshop it. The OATS team brought in technology, workshopped it, and broadcast it around the country to all the senior centers.
That became a starting point for a broader movement around aging and tech. They shifted the focus to harnessing technology to change the way people age. Humans have added years to the human lifespan, but they haven’t figured out what to do with it. The technology creates an opportunity to do more and do better.
Expansion
OATS has five major areas where people are getting results. One is social engagement. You’ve got tech as the big convener. They also get financial security. Both income and managing household finances. They did a project at Queensbridge Houses where they knocked on every single senior-headed household door in Queensbridge, which is the largest public housing program in North America. And they asked people what they wanted. And a lot of them wanted financial security training, and virtually no one had ever done a household budget.
They designed a budget and financial program with people. They got it funded by a local bank and founded this program that people used to help manage their finances. People who had never looked at their income and expenses had a chance to do that. It was empowering. They found real opportunities in health and wellness and fitness, creative expression, and civic participation, which is being politically active.
That initiative grew to first a state-wide footprint. They started looking at other states to begin expanding. They expanded into Denver, where they started another center. They expanded into San Antonio and Maryland in Montgomery County.
There aren’t many resources available for this. There’s no national program for tech and seniors. They were cobbling together funding from New York City and San Antonio, private funders, banks, and whoever they could get it from. OATS got a call from AARP. They were looking for ways to expand their programming capability. But they wanted to do it without starting from scratch.
They wanted a non-profit affiliate. It’s almost like a corporate merger, but it’s an affiliation in the non-profit sector. They selected OATS as a partner, and they became an affiliate after a year of negotiation. There are only four affiliates in the nation, and OATS is the only tech one.
This allowed them to get their curriculum to 500,000 people they couldn’t reach before. In 2024, they served 670,000 visitors and about 500,000 online. Senior Planet is no longer just a center. They don’t charge older adults (over 60) for classes. The average Senior Planet participant is between 70 and 75, depending on the location.
They don’t have registration because they want it to be as friction-free as possible. The center on 25th Street doesn’t have an elevator. They wanted it to be fully accessible from the sidewalk. The new space on 30th Street won’t have an elevator either. It’s fully accessible from the sidewalk.
The website has a call center associated with it. If you go to Senior Planet.org, select Resources and Hotline. It is free and is open from 9 am to 8 pm, Eastern time. People can call with their tech questions. The call center serves tens of thousands of people every year. They have 160 locations where OATS personnel teach across the country.
Curriculum
They have 2,500 pages of curriculum. More than half of the curriculum is available in Spanish and Chinese. They’ve also added Vietnamese and Haitian Creole.
It would be impossible to expect their staff to teach the curriculum and no one else can use it. With 11,000 senior centers in the U.S., that would be a tall order. To solve the problem, they’ve created Senior Planet licensing that’s free.
Now they have 480 community partners in 37 states that license the Senior Planet curriculum. They provide a five-week training session. Once the OATS team is comfortable they know the curriculum and the model, the partner downloads all the materials, outreach stuff, translations, and trainer guides, and people report back how many people they served and their satisfaction. They use a net promoter score measure to determine whether the partners and customers like it.
Testing Products Targeting Older Adults
OATS works with people developing apps and devices targeting older adults. When someone comes to them with a product, the team asks what prompted the creation of the new product. They will ask how they test it with older adults. They may have had a relative use it. But OATS can do more with that. They can have a process around it and do test-bedding.
You can bring products to the center, and they’ll do a triage of what’s most useful and helpful and test that out and people give feedback. It helps people design products better and helps us do better training. But it turns out most developers don’t test, especially not with older adults. OATS worked with AARP to create a guide for technology design for designers who are doing tech design for older adults.
Co-design is critical. The developers need to immerse themselves with older folks to understand what their user experience needs might be. The key is to start from an anthropological frame of mind. Sit down and observe. Maybe ask a few questions and then observe some more and think about what might be helpful and design the product upward from the user need and you might come up with something that gets deployed and might sustain.
They have a project in which they’re interviewing gerontologists or people who have long-term expertise in the field. They called out interesting things. People pointed out that when you work with young people, you know where to find them. They’re all in schools. When you try to find older adults in the community, they’re not in schools. They’re all over the place. It’s fragmented. There isn’t one institutional place where you know everybody is going to pass through at a given time like with K-12 education.
You have to think about senior centers. The percentage of New Yorkers who go to a Senior Center in any given year is around 5% or 6%. Most adults are not in senior centers. They’re in community sites and things like that. You have to find different throughputs to get people in different places.
That’s another advantage of the licensing program. They license to any non-commercial entities. Libraries, housing groups, YMCAs, urban league groups, anybody who can put 25 older adults in a room. Part of the model is finding diverse channels that reach people.
Programming
There’s an enormous demand for focusing on health and wellness. Right now, OATS puts lots of curriculum online. They watch who attends what and what the ratings are for the classes. Their fitness programs are so popular that it’s a problem.
Their best program in the morning is the Morning Stretch. They have Caz, who runs the fitness program on 25th Street in person. When they went online, he went online. It turns out he is like Mr. Rogers with this fitness program. People cannot get enough of this guy. The online class had 50 people a day. That’s a lot. Then, it was 100 … 300 … and recently it was 850!
People go on, they love the program. You’ve got to see him. He’s kind of Eastern influenced but he also does a little martial arts stuff. Something about it is hypnotic. Very successful programs around fitness. It’s not just this one class. There are so many coming to fitness classes that they need to diversify them a little bit to ensure other things they care about get touched.
So, they do an open mic night and programs around songwriting. Virtual travel is super popular. This is where a live person does the guiding. They’ve done the Great Wall of China and Central America. People log on and go through the tour with a camera, and they can ask questions and interact with a guide in real time.
There are a lot of popular programs on artificial intelligence (AI). OATS works with OpenAI. I know. They’ve helped build curriculum and teach classes on the grassroots level to see what works and what’s helpful for people. Most older adults are capable of learning the technology. You have to understand where people are starting.
Some are still beginners with some of the technology or have some anxiety. Unfortunately, there are so many negative messages coming to people around aging and tech. You have to overcome that by relieving people of the stress and reassuring them by saying things like they’ll be supported, everyone learns this stuff, there’s no test, and there’s no stress. OATS learned to make it relevant and methodologically appropriate for people.
And we’ve had a lot of success getting people to keep coming. OATS continues to grow. The budget is around $20 million this year. They have a staff of 80. It’s been quite a journey.
Video Highlights
- How OATS started.
- Collaborating with users to find out what they want.
- Creating Senior Planet.
- Growing OATS.
- Building products for older adults.
- Q&A with Tom.
Watch the Video
Bio
Tom Kamber is the executive director of Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) and Senior Planet from AARP. He is a leading expert on aging and technology and is regularly featured in national media. Under his leadership, OATS and Senior Planet have developed award-winning programs for older adults across America and are now charitable affiliates of AARP.
Tom has taught courses on technology, urban studies, and philanthropy at Columbia University, is widely published in professional and academic journals, and has presented his work on five continents. He is also a co-founder of the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance (which has won multiple Grammy awards), and serves on several nonprofit boards of directors and public commissions.
Resources
- OATS.org
- seniorplanet.org
- Contact OATS: info@oats.org
