Well renowned Pittsburgh technology source, CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) has the Carnegie Mellon’s Quality of Life Technology Center (QoLT) which has a partnership with University of Pittsburgh and TravellingWave to develop advanced speech products for the elderly. This was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
TravellingWave has a product called VoicePredict™ which combines voice recognition and text with near 100% accuracy.
This is a great example of how new technology can indeed provide help and solutions to the elderly. Click on the links of each for more detail on the project.