Walking a mile in another’s shoes: The impact of wearing an Age Suit

Abstract

The "Age Suit" described in this article was developed to enable future designers, business leaders, and engineers to experience navigating the world as many older adults must. Tools such as this Age Suit offer the opportunity to "walk a mile" in another's shoes to develop empathy that can result in better design of spaces, goods, and services to meet the needs of a rapidly growing older population. This work first examined, through a series of clinical tests, whether younger adults' physical capacities were reduced in a direction consistent with aging by wearing a suit developed by the MIT AgeLab. An experiential learning task was then completed with the suit to understand its impact on completion of an instrumental activity of daily living. Results showed that younger adults wearing the suit experienced changes in task performance consistent with expected changes associated with aging. Participants' self-reports from the experiential learning task indicated that they were able to empathize with older adults regarding some issues they face while completing a grocery shopping task. Future research with the suit should involve a wider range of individuals from the population and examine what effect participants' levels of fitness have on the experience of wearing the suit.

“Suiting Up” to Enhance Empathy Toward Aging: A Randomized Controlled Study

“…The concept of using simulation suits is relatively new and is increasingly being examined as a learning tool for healthcare students (15,16,19), but use of simulation suits had not been studied in a randomized controlled cohort of pharmacy students. Our study found that the immersive aging simulation suit did not significantly improve participants' self-rated empathy levels compared to a polypharmacy workshop only.…”

“…In the study, the authors noted that students gained a better understanding of the functional issues and social isolation that are associated with aging after using the aging suit. Lavallière et al similarly examined the use of an aging suit among younger adults (19) and found that they could relate better to the physical limitations and reduced performance associated with aging.…”

Exploring the use of ageing simulation to enable nurses to gain insight into what it is like to be an older person

“…Ageing-suits are emerging as a promising addition to the simulation family because they have the unique ability to situate the learner as the "older person" and not just as the healthcare professional (Lavalliere et al, 2017). Ageing-suits are constructed to Relevance to clinical practice: Ageing-suits were identified as a worthwhile educational approach for aged care nurses to improve their specialised clinical practices with older people.…”

“…Educators implement a wide range of simulation modalities, for example standardised patients (actors), part‐task trainers or full‐body mannequins (Hegland et al., 2017; Meyer et al., 2014). The healthcare sector uses more advanced simulation modalities because they take advantage of the new technologies, particularly ageing‐suits (Evans, Lombardo, Belgeri, & Fontane, 2005; Halpin, 2015; Lavalliere et al., 2017).…”

“…Ageing‐suits are emerging as a promising addition to the simulation family because they have the unique ability to situate the learner as the “older person” and not just as the healthcare professional (Lavalliere et al., 2017). Ageing‐suits are constructed to simulate the experience of the ageing process and can be broadly divided into two categories: basic and complex.…”