Aging population?

I know that this blog is about social enterprises and social innovations, but today I just felt like posting something else. Sort of like a social issues and my thought on it.

So yesterday I was on the way back from doing project and I witnessed an incident.

I was exiting from Dhoby Ghaut Mrt station around late afternoon. On my left, was the escalator up to Dhoby xchange and my right was the escalator down to the Mrt station. There was approximately a good 100 metres wide of stairs in between these 2 escalators. Midway through the escalator up, I began to hear a cry. It wasn't like the normal cry. It sounded confused, terrified and helpless and it was inaudible, like "ergh, urgh". I turned to my right and say this old uncle grabbing onto the side of the escalator with only half of his head visible. I was so shocked, he looked so scared and old. Around the age of 80+?. Then a lady ran down, shortly followed by a man to assist him. I didn't know what was going on, I guess he tripped on the escalator and couldn't get up. He just kept crying out and it was so traumatizing. He sounded so scared. When I reached to the top of the escalator, I saw the lady at the bottom the the escalator trying to pull something out. I was petrified. I think it was the uncle's item or that the uncle is stuck there. I don't know what. I couldn't see because a crowd was gathering and all of us was so surprised. Until a lady shouted "hey! the emergency button!" Then someone quickly acted and stopped the escalator from moving. It all happened so fast.

It such a traumatizing incident. & it was not the first time experience for me. Before, I experienced it first hand, being caught on the moving escalator because an old lady fell while trying to get off. It was such a horrifying experience. The escalator just kept moving up and people where stacking on each other. Its like domino effect. It was crazy, everyone just kept shouting and crossing over each other. The old lady was beneath me and screaming. I was trying so hard not to press on her and crawl my way out before helping her out. It was really really horrible.

After I saw the uncle, which led to recalling my first experience, I thought 'hey, do these kind of things happen a lot in Singapore?'
With us being an aging population, there will definitely be a lot of these cases happening. Why so? Are we going to say that because we are experiencing aging population so an increase of such incidents are inevitable? I felt that if there was someone accompanying the elderly out, we can prevent such incidents to happening. Someone younger will be able to keep a lookout for the elderly. But how? I think this is something we should all 
think about.