At last week's UCLA Technology & Aging Conference, representatives from Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) , Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) , Toyota and other big-name firms discussed how technology is reshaping lifestyles for older individuals. However, important policy implications directly connected to these new tools went unspoken.

RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that can monitor the status of older individuals, face-recognition video systems that allow two-way video calls when someone simply enters the room, and robot-assisted remote telesurgery are just a few of the amazing systems described at the conference.

Eric Dishman, Intel's director of product research and innovation, discussed his company's goal of getting "rid of the nursing home" and putting "technologies in people's homes." Dishman is working from a distributed computing point of view, where caregiver expertise can arrive across time, and medical technology can be distributed from outdated institutions to an individual's most frequented location