SIEMENS

Nothing beats it. It's the supreme rush. The ultimate dream. And all you have to do is close your eyes, take one big step, and you're there — sailing through the sky, the flexible micro-surfaces of your wings responding to every fluctuation in the wind, their cilia gathering energy from it, while the movements of your shoulders and the pressure of your fingers on “joy spheres” trigger mini jets that steer you effortlessly through the blue, sometimes for hours, if you wish.

Sure, I could do this by myself or with a couple of buddies. But in point of fact, it's a special kind of thrill to guide a group of my customers — the ones who've achieved the highest level of fitness at one of my centers — on these high-flying excursions.

And yet people still sometimes ask me why I don't sell the company and retire. Retire and do what? This is what I like! Seventy-five would have been the normal age to call it quits, they say. But I feel as fit as a fiddle, am still enjoying the singles scene, and continue to love my work — even though I just uncorked my 80th year.

Business has been outstanding since day one. After all, wasn't it clear even decades ago that there would be steadily-mounting demand for services that would help keep older people — the fastest - growing segment of our population—looking and feeling great? So when I was 40 I expanded my orthopedics and sports medicine practice to include an associated senior fitness club called “Perfect Fit.” The formula worked like a dream. Before long, I set up a franchise and have been opening clinic-club combos every year. Members start out with a round of magnetic resonance-based physical, psychological and emotional health assessments, receive a rating, and then sign up for a personalized road map to holistic health that includes exercise, diet, sleep and lifestyle measures along with regular follow-up assessments.

Years ago, many of my customers were lucky to achieve a level 3 or 4 on our 10 point whole-fitness scale. But the numbers have climbed steadily over the decades. Today, the fortunate folks who were born in the 1980s and later have benefitted from all sorts of improvements in the workplace, at home, in vehicles, and of course in medical care.

Take household and travel-related accidents, for instance, which used to injure and kill millions of people per year. Today there are things such as personalized exoskeletons that help to increase the number of people who reach retirement age in vigorous condition. People who simply need to move heavy objects around a house, business or farm without risk of pulling a muscle or harming their backs can slip into a fashionable power-suit (pink for the ladies is still popular!) and thereby increase their strength ten to twenty-fold.

And for those who, in the past, were driven to desperation out of solitude or sickness, there are soft-skin, human-faced robots that will listen tirelessly, and “snuggle-bots” — personalized cuddly animal-like robots that respond in emotional ways to people's needs.

Cars, which used to sit uselessly in garages or clutter up streets waiting for a person to use them — and then cause literally millions of injuries per year worldwide — have become the most useful of all our robots. They travel about independently in navigational networks that optimize flow and eliminate the potential for collisions. They take older people wherever they need to go regardless of weather or lighting, take care of errands ranging from managing household and business supplies to picking up friends at the nearest metro stop or, as the case may be, meeting a group of senior high fliers after a glorious day in the wild blue yonder. And when they're not in service for their owners, they automatically switch to a kind of community mode, billing others for their use.

Did I forget to mention health problems? Back in 2010 over 60 % of people over 63 had atrial fibrillation, one of the major causes of stroke and heart failure. But only ten years later those numbers had diminished dramatically thanks to early detection systems, breakthroughs in medical imaging, and the ability to actually see the areas in people's hearts that cause arrhythmias and eliminate them using tiny ablation catheters. Atrial valve problems and aneurysms—two other major causes of declining health and death in people over 60 — have been largely eliminated thanks to image-guided placement of artificial valves and blood flow diverters. In both cases, the ability to simulate blood flow dynamics under different conditions has given doctors a powerful tool in optimizing the selection and placement of these devices.

Many other major causes of declining health and death, including cancers, high blood pressure and diabetes, have declined into insignificance over the decades with the introduction of personalized, injectable, wireless sensors based on the user's genetic predispositions. Such sensors detect the first signs of these illnesses, notify the user, and help to ensure early treatment.

Looking back over the last 50 years, I have to say that Alzheimer's disease was the last major hurdle. I saw a lot of my best friends and many loyal customers go down that road. It seems to me that it was around 2025 before the first really effective drugs became available. By then there were close to 50 million people worldwide who were dying of the disease. Ten years later, thanks to widespread genetic screening, most cases were being caught and treated before the onset of symptoms. Today, AD is something for medical historians.

As for psychological ailments, particularly the depressions that governed the lives of millions of older people in the past, but also conditions such as obsessive-compulsive and addictive behaviors, and even phobias such as — God forbid — fear of flying, relief has come not in the form of drugs, but through medical imaging. Today, people can see a depiction of their condition using magnetic resonance imaging and learn how to willfully control it through real-time feedback. It's worked for a number of my customers who once said that they could never imagine being way up here with nothing beneath them but thin air.