Sometimes the residents of the Kensington Park Retirement Community in Maryland don't know quite what to make of Carolyn Layton.

At lunch one recent afternoon, Layton, 74, pulled up in her motorized chair to her usual table in the dining room. Josette, her regular lunch companion, was already there, picking the toppings off her pizza.

"You should sell the rest of it on eBay," Layton joked.

"What's that?" Josette asked.

"It's an auction," Layton explained.

"Oh."

Layton went back to her grilled cheese and tomato. By now, she's used to the people around her not always understanding her. But she would rather be a bit of a misfit than give up her Internet connection - even if it is dial-up.

Layton uses the motorized chair because of a degenerative spine ailment. But her mind is agile. Without e-mail and the Internet, her world would not stretch far beyond the confines of her retirement home, where the highlight of the day for many is a session of "Sittercise" or a van ride to Target. Layton reads six daily newspapers online, instant-messages her grandson in Maine and downloads bits of animation to attach to e-mails.

Layton thinks her neighbors, some of whom suffer from early Alzheimer's, would benefit from time spent online.

"Half the people here are bored," she said. Surfing the Internet "would keep their synapses firing."

This notion that technology is the key to maintaining not only the health of mature adults - from the active 65-year-old retiree to the homebound 80-year-old - but also their social lives and their minds is taking hold in boardrooms, research labs and government agencies.

By technology, we're talking about more than defibrillators and hearing aids. We're talking retirement homes built with high-speed Internet connections; about souped-up caller ID that not only identifies who is calling but reminds you of the people you know in common and the subject of your last conversation. We mean "smart houses" that tell your daughter how many times you opened the refrigerator or got up off the sofa during the day, so she can call or stop by if she thinks something is wrong.

That high-tech companies are even focused on mature adults marks an industry change, said Ken Dychtwald, a gerontologist and president of Age Wave, a San Francisco marketing firm. When the Internet came along, "it was a party, and older people were not invited," he said. "All the language, the media, the marketing, Wired magazine, was about the new, the young, the hip, the cool, the next -not about Grandma. To their amazing credit, even though they weren't invited, seniors began climbing the castle walls and crashing the party."

At first, the folks who made it over the wall didn't bring too many friends along. In 2000, just 15 percent of people over age 65 used the Internet, according to Susannah Fox, director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"They were a very elite group. They were white, male, wealthy, very well educated and more likely to have a computer at home," Fox said. The demographics of this older group "looked like the Internet in 1993."

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