By Sue Shellenbarger. Wall Street Journal

As the nation ages, I've long believed technology holds promise in helping families care long-term for the elderly.

To test my theory and see what it would be like to live in a world of high-tech elder care, I fast-forwarded my own life into old age and, for 24 hours, became a resident of the nation's most high-tech assisted-living facility.

Oatfield Estates in Milwaukie, Ore., uses surveillance and monitoring gear to help care for its 35 frail residents. Intent on setting a new direction in long-term care, owners Bill Reed and Lydia Lundberg of Elite Care, a closely held company, agreed to let me test their experiment first-hand.

Though Oatfield's ambience is homelike -- with plants, pets and live-in caregivers -- small sensors dot the walls to track residents' movements. Security cameras mark campus boundaries. Residents wear transponders around their necks that triple as alarms, room keys and location monitors. Beds are wired to detect occupants' weight and movements. While other U.S. facilities use some of this gear, Oatfield has integrated more technology more deeply into its routines.

To gain a family caregiver's perspective on this "brave new world of elder care," as one resident's son calls it, I enlisted my own version of Big Brother -- literally, my brother Dave Shellenbarger in Michigan. He agreed to tap into Oatfield's database from his home computer, as family caregivers of the future may do, to monitor my well-being via Oatfield's systems. A retired entrepreneur who built a successful computer business, Dave has a corner on the tech expertise in our family. (And, he joked, Oatfield gave him the power at last to oversee my comings and goings.)

In the first of two columns, here's a diary of my experience:

5 p.m. Sunday: After moving in, I don a transponder on a lanyard and set out for a stroll on the parklike campus. Sitting at his computer 2,300 miles away, Dave watches me on the security cameras. We chat by phone, and I peer into one of the cameras. "You should have been on TV," he teases. Grumpy at being seen without being able to see, I mutter, "Yeah, on 'The Golden Girls,' maybe."

Suddenly, I'm startled to see two caregivers, Sonja Soderstrom and Glenda Neilson, racing toward me at a dead run. "Are you OK?" Sonja asks. My transponder set off an alarm when I wandered too far, they explain. I apologize for getting too frisky. Only later do I realize Glenda and Sonja were also consumed at that moment by caring for a dying resident. Without technology, my wanderings might have been missed in the cross-currents of life and death here.

Therein lies Oatfield's biggest tradeoff: putting up with the annoyance of technology in return for freedom of movement. To me, it's no contest. Keeping the right to take a stroll far outweighs the aggravation of being monitored. Several residents, I soon learn, see it the same way, having moved from nursing homes with locked wards to the relative freedom of this high-tech world.

10:15 p.m. Sunday: After a family-style dinner in the homey kitchen area of my 12-resident chalet, I retreat to my small suite for the night. I have another Luddite Moment as I get my transponder tangled up with the call-button cord on my bedpost. It dawns on me I'm wearing the high-tech equivalent of a belt and suspenders, so I doff the transponder. Still, sensors blink silently from my walls. Coiled like an octopus at my feet is a mass of black cords attached to weight-measuring "load cells" under my bed.

But as I settle in, I forget the gadgets. They loom no larger than the glow of a smoke alarm. Thus emerges another truth: In time, Oatfield's warm environment overwhelms any sense of high-tech dehumanization. Were I trapped in a poorly staffed warehouse for the aged, the same technology would be a nightmare. In this homey place, it fades into the background.

1 p.m. Monday: Dave checks in by phone, and I'm startled at how much he knows. He logs on to my location chart, seeing where I've been, when, for how long and with whom, all transmitted by transponders. "You sure spend a lot of time in the kitchen," he says. "You've been all over the place, with a whole bunch of people." Eyeing my bed chart, he notes that I slept well and my weight seems OK. On a room diagram with a tiny mug shot scanned in as a proxy, he "watches" me move about.

Some people would be put off, but Oatfield's security system has allayed my privacy concerns. Instead, I find the data deepen our conversation, helping Dave ask informed questions -- such as why did I lie down for a while at 11:15 a.m.? (Just a little break to gather my thoughts.) Old people's regard for such technology, I realize, will rest partly on their feelings about the family member using it. A bad underlying relationship would produce resentment. But being monitored by someone I trust simply makes me feel well cared-for.

My cellphone rings; it's my son, 11. "Hey Mom!" he says. "Did you kick butt in Bingo?" Laughing, I explain that being cooped up playing Bingo is precisely what Oatfield is NOT about. Thanks in part to technology, residents have much more freedom to chose how to spend their time.
This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal