Life Hacks for Older People
By
Peter Shackle
Posted: 2025-05-07T05:37:00Z
Fact: Among persons aged 80 and older, approximately 3 in 10 have early age-related macular degeneration. If this is affecting you, it might be only in one eye and you could be completely oblivious that you have lost the sight in one eye, because mostly the other (good) eye compensates for the loss. The main consequence of deteriorating vision in one eye is loss of depth perception. Even this does not make much difference except for one crucial everyday activity: Parking your car in a tight space in a small garage. You might need to pull the car in with only an inch or two of clearance, like this:
To perceive two inches (or not) of clearance on the right side of the car when you are on the left, is trivial for a normal person. However, if you have decreased depth perception it can be close to impossible, leading to constant complaints from your spouse that you are taking up more than your fair share of the garage. Luckily there is a simple solution. Everybody is familiar with the old idea of using hanging tennis balls or laser pointers on the ceiling, but those ideas only help to tell you when you have arrived. Instead, an older person with decreased depth perception needs guidance on how to get there. The answer is to get a pair of Miortior Lamps that look like this:
You can buy them by clicking here: Miortior Lamps
I set one to be permanently green at the front, and the other to be permanently red at the back, behind the green one. They are turned on and off with a hand-held controller that I keep in the car, which will activate them from the street outside. When you approach the garage correctly it looks like this:
All you see is a green light.
But if you are 6” to the right it looks like this:
And if you are 6” to the left it is like this:
With the car pulled into the garage and perfectly parked, it looks like this:
You can position the car to within an inch sideways, and for forward positioning I just rely on the proximity sensors which are standard on many cars.