US researchers find that older adults who use computers, smartphones and the internet have lower rates of cognitive impairment
It started with a secondary school typing course.
Wanda Woods enrolled because her father advised her that typing proficiency would lead to jobs. Sure enough, the United States’ federal Environmental Protection Agency hired her as an after-school worker while she was still a junior.
Her supervisor “sat me down and put me on a machine called a word processor”, Woods, now 67, recalled. “It was big and bulky and used magnetic cards to store information. I thought, ‘I kinda like this.’”
Decades later, she was still liking it. In 2012 – the first year that more than half of Americans 65 and older were internet users – she started a computer training business.
