NAHANT – She’s only 34, but when this Nahant native slips into AGNES she feels like she’s in her 80s.Rozanne Puleo, who currently lives in Somerville, designed an Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES) suit designed to allow people to feel elderly.”It’s de-signed to help people find out what it feels like to have functional impairment especially felt by older adults,” she said. “It has got a tremendous reception and a lot interest. The idea was to develop it as an educational tool for engineers to teach them what it feels like to be old. Most engineers are in their 30s and have no idea how difficult it is to be functionally impaired. This gives people a good idea of what it feels like to be functionally impaired.”Puleo, daughter of Nahant Police dispatcher Roz Puleo, said she came up with the AGNES idea in 2005 while she was a researcher at MIT.”There are a couple of different empathy suits that exist – the pregnancy belly and obesity empathy suit,” she said. “We heard of a university creating a suit for Nissan that limits mobility but it was not allowed to be released to the public. I said I bet I can create that.”Puleo, who is a physiologist by trade, said she has worked closely with older adults who have chronic diseases.”I understand what happens to the aging body,” she said. “I made the first version in 2005. It was a rough version made with Bungee cords and stuff. It wasn’t enclosed in a suit. This is my second version. I smoothed it over and enclosed it in a suit.”Puleo said several companies have actually used the suit, including automobile manufacturers.”With one automotive company we had them try to do simple things like getting in and out of the car,” she said. “It’s not easy when you have mobility impairment due to age. We’re hoping if automotive engineers have first-hand experience with this suit they will think about older consumers and take these things into account when designing vehicles.”She said AGNES was also used by companies that develop product packaging.”It made them realize how difficult some of these packages really are to open,” she said. “There are these packaging styles you just can’t get into. So we went through an exercise having them open their own products wearing this suit. They got a first-hand perspective of what it’s like for older consumers.”Puleo has even worn the suit into grocery stores to do grocery shopping.It’s not just a suit we use in a lab,” she said. “We do activities with it depending on organization we work with. It really helps people understand what people with functional impairment are up against every day.”Puleo said she was a research assistant at MIT from 2003 through 2006 where she conducted aging-related research, both qualitatively and quantitatively, focusing on maintaining independence through transportation, physical function, health behavior and technology adoption. She developed the first exercise module for AARP’s Nationwide Driver Safety Program. Puleo wrote the script and appeared in the instructional video, which is viewed annually by more than a million senior citizens.She is currently a research fellow at MIT and is enrolled in a nurse practitioner program. She also teaches a health behavior and communications class at Tufts.As for the future of AGNES, Puleo said this summer she will work on validating the suit and quantifying it.”I don’t know what the future applications are,” she said. “But there are has been a lot of interest in it and I think it could be used as a tool in a lot of ways.”