Holiday Tech for the Seniors in Your Life

My dad turned 78 a few weeks ago. On a whim, my brothers, sister, and I bought him a Nintendo Wii (not an easy task these days). Now, instead of sitting at the computer playing FreeCell, straining his eyes, and not getting much exercise, he's bowling and playing tennis in the Wii world. The sports take place on the large TV screen, which is less taxing on the eyes. And he's moving all the time. His friends come over for Wii competitions. The grandkids are happy little clams when they come over. And when the novelty of the sports games wears thin, there are lots of other games to explore. My hat's off to Nintendo for making a gaming machine that crosses the gender/age gap.

With that in mind, here are a few other tech-inspired gifts the senior in your family might appreciate.

Jitterbug Cell Phone: A specially designed cell phone and service plan created with older folks in mind. The phone uses big backlit buttons and large text; the design paid attention to details like the phone's grip and audio adjustments. The phone costs $147 and the cell phone plan is a simple pay-monthly with no contracts and no fees for switching and canceling. Jitterbug operators are specially trained to handle requests from this special audience.

Arlene Harris, the CEO of Jitterbug, recommended some other communications services that are helpful to seniors. My Celery from MyCelery lets people send and receive emails without a computer or Internet connection. Seniors can handwrite a message that gets converted to email and delivered. Family and friends can email mom, and the message gets delivered as text. It works with any fax machine, so it can share the home phone line for single-line families. It retails for $13.08 a month (color) and $8.98 (black and white). A fax machine is available for $99.

Keeping your photos close to you is always comforting; so is keeping your keys close. Now you can do both. Digital Foci has a $40 photo viewer/keychain. The photo viewer has a small (1.5 inch) screen and holds up to 74 pictures with its 8MB internal memory. (You win brownie points if you load the pictures in advance.)

Intuitively we all know that the computer can't be too good for your eyes. But there are some little things you can do to make screen time less strained. Simply install a program like Web Eyes. You can download and install a trial version that's good for 15 days. Web Eyes puts up a simple toolbar addition that lets you select the plus sign (+) for making something bigger and the minus sign (-) for making the typeface smaller. That's it. Web Eyes 123 kindly offered a discount (20 percent) to Yahoo! readers. To take advantage of this discount, use the promo code: DP55.

Once you reach a certain age, you deserve a break from washing floors. Scooba is the Roomba vacuum cleaner's first cousin. It's a floor-washing robot. In multiple passes, it does a pretty decent job of cleaning. There's a pre-wash, a wash, scrub, and rinse (which is more than most humans do). The water circulates from clean into a dirty holding basket so that you're never just moving dirty water around the floor. And you can toss Scooba in the dishwasher to clean. Chris Null Scooba-ed his floors after a Thanksgiving dinner, and he has the full report.

Or just do what I did and go for the Wii.