Friendship online: a mobile app to tackle social isolation
Introductions to People, Places and Things for Adults 50+.
Aside from trips to the grocery store or doctor’s office, COVID-19 has confined many of us to our homes. That staple of daily life, human interaction, has shrunk. But for older adults, social isolation can be a daily challenge regardless of pandemic, and over time this can affect mental and physical health.
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Charlene Nadalin started to worry about her mother after her father passed away. “When my mother was widowed, there was not a huge support group. I became a little concerned about her quality of life and well-being.”
“My husband and my two children were my life,” says Marge Nadalin, now 76. Her other focus was the family construction business and when she retired her social network became even more curtailed. “My social life in a sense was communicating with customers. I’m not a party person.”
Charlene wanted to help – but how? She was a corporate executive in Toronto while Marge lived thousands of kilometers away in Florida. “What could I do from a distance to ensure my mom continued to live a happy and healthy life?
“I started asking my friends questions and speaking with physicians about what they were seeing with their patients. I learned that social isolation is a growing epidemic among mature adults.”
Nadalin’s research led her to conclude that what many older adults crave is friendship. “The real gap,” she says, “is in platonic connectedness, not dating.” To fill the gap, she left her corporate job to develop an app to help adults aged 50+ find new friends.
Her company, Amintro, launched the free app in 2018. New members answer a series of questions about their background and interests: Do they like walks or movies? Do they have grandchildren? Where did they grow up and where do they live now?
“Once the onboarding process is completed, our algorithms are designed to identify several Amintronians nearby with whom members have commonalities,” Nadalin explains.
Amintro provides ice-breaker questions to help get conversations started. From there, members can decide if they’d like to speak by phone or meet in person. “The objective is to make connections online to facilitate communication,” Nadalin says. “But at the end of the day, we advocate that our members meet in person – though not, of course, during these times of social distancing.”
If Amintro is about helping people connect, Nadalin has found that AGE-WELL fills a similar role for her business. Amintro became an AGE-WELL startup affiliate in 2019.
