Friday, August 16, 2019

Senior living community’s partnership puts VR in the hands of seniors


By Anne Stych  – Contributing Writer, Aug 15, 2019, 3:47pm EDT
Signature Pointe is a finalist in the Technology Adopter Award category for the 2019 Tech Titan awards. Category winners will be announced at an awards event on Friday, Aug. 23. For more information about the awards event, click here.
Technology has come a long way in the lifetime of Signature Pointe residents, and thanks to the senior living community’s partnership with tech innovators, they continue to reap its benefits.
Signature Pointe, managed by Life Care Services, has joined together with Dallas-headquartered MyndVR to provide residents with VR technology to help improve their quality of life.
The residents, including those in memory-care programs, can access senior-friendly content with virtual reality headsets.
Here are Signature Pointe Sales and Marketing Director Nancy McCarthy’s answers the Business Journal's questions about working in tech in DFW.
What does the intersection of people and technology mean to you?
I think our youth are losing their social skills because of technology. I see this in the interns that come to work for me. Some of them who come from social families find it easy to adapt to people and social interaction, and some who grew up with technology and not much family socialization find it very difficult. In the senior living environment, you have to have social skills — our seniors did not grow up on technology.
Who is your tech hero?
The leaders I had the pleasure of working with at Nortel during my 15-year career with them here in Richardson. If it were not for the male leaders at Nortel who took chances and hired women for technology roles in the 1980s, I would not have grown to love the technology field.
What’s an example of technology that people don’t use any more yet we take its replacement for granted?
Replacing the rotary phone with the cell phone as the only phone in people’s homes. Being an engineer for Nortel and working in the telecom industry on the advancement in cellular technology was amazing. I think people today can’t imagine not having a cell phone, but we had great lives without them back in the 1970s.
What do you think is something that will happen with technology in the future that people don’t see coming?
People not being able to communicate one-on-one with each other without the use of technology.
What is something that other technology-focused cities have but north Texas is missing?
Other cities have had the benefit of startups that have become leaders in technology, so those cities just get noticed more. I think people forget that Dallas is home to Texas Instruments and many great technology companies — we just have not had popular tech success stories like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. come out of Dallas. We need a good success story, so let’s start inspiring our kids to create the next best thing here in Dallas.

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