Shuffling around their offices wearing goggles, leg weights, inflatable water wings and thick gloves, Roxanne Casey and her colleagues realized how hard it can be to find a phone number or open a safety pin. By the end of the two-hour Through Other Eyes workshop - intended to mimic the physical challenges of old age - everyone was exhausted, but enlightened.

"They were blown away because they just didn't realize how difficult it was," says Casey, resource development co-ordinator with Community Care Haliburton County in Ontario. "You had fun but it was also one of those 'Ah ha!' moments: this is going to happen to all of us. Chances are as we get older, unless we're really, really lucky, something is going to happen."

With the front end of the baby boom on the cusp of their senior years and their parents already there, there's rising demand for insights like these. From role-playing workshops to "living labs" with two-way mirrors and hidden cameras, companies and service-providers are looking for better ways to understand older consumers.

"It's absolutely booming," says Michelle Pratt, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. "The fact that someone turns 62 every seven seconds means that this segment of the population is the fastest-growing, the most lucrative market. Companies know this demands a new approach to old age."

The AgeLab brings together experts in different fields with the aim of improving quality of life, says Pratt, who's currently researching natural disaster planning for older adults. There is a vehicle simulator in the lab and another for the road that lets them assess how varying age groups interact with car technology, she says, offering as an example iPod-style controls that may be second nature to young adults but foreign territory to their grandparents. The lab also has a handful of "empathy suits" that simulate balance difficulties, deteriorating sight and hearing and loss of muscle control.

Car makers, technology firms, health care providers, pharmaceutical companies, even a shoe company and Canadian funeral home have sought their expertise, Pratt says, and more are calling all the time.

At Ontario's Sheridan College, design students have crafted beautiful wineglasses with thick, ornate stems for arthritic hands and a clock that displays the picture and name of a loved one every time a person with Alzheimer's disease checks the time.

"I have a real interest in shaping the designers of tomorrow and saying, 'This is the population you're going to be working with,'" says Pat Spadafora, director of the school's Elder Research Centre. "It's like a little underground movement. I'm not sure that people realize how many students choose to do projects around aging."

Designers and manufacturers have been slower to follow suit because aging is "a hard sell" and people don't even want to face their own, Spadafora says. 

When they do take into account the needs of older consumers, they often make the mistake of assuming seniors are all the same and in serious physical and mental decline, says Gloria Gutman, former director of the Gerontology Research Centre at Simon Fraser University. It's a totally misguided idea, she says: figures show that five per cent of seniors are in institutions and completely dependent and ten per cent live at home with mobility limitations, but the vast majority are doing just fine.

"The older person of today is evolving," she says. "When you look at Mick Jagger or Tina Turner, those are people that are seniors if you go by the chronological age, but they sure are not like Whistler's Mother. Seniors come in all shapes and sizes, and the 65-year-old of today is like the 55-year-old of a decade ago."

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