Investigation and Analysis of the Age-Friendly Dilemma of Smart Elderly Care Services under AI Empowerment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71204/rjz0ta36Keywords:
Smart Eldercare, Artificial Intelligence, Age-Friendly Design, Digital Divide, Intergenerational CollaborationAbstract
Against the backdrop of population aging and the widespread adoption of digital technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into home- and community-based eldercare. However, many older adults continue to face a digital divide, while smart eldercare products often provide only superficial age-friendly adaptations and fail to match users' needs. This study examines older residents of urban communities and their family members. Drawing on a literature review, a questionnaire survey, and semi-structured interviews, it investigates the development of AI-enabled smart eldercare services and the difficulties older adults encounter when using smart devices and related services. Informed by digital divide theory, active aging theory, and supply-and-demand matching theory, the study analyzes the factors underlying these difficulties and proposes a smart eldercare service model that uses age-friendly short videos as a delivery medium and intergenerational collaboration as its core mechanism. It further develops operational strategies across six dimensions: content, target groups, channels, technology, implementation, and operations. Survey findings are used to assess the model's feasibility. The proposed approach offers communities and social organizations a low-cost, practical framework for more inclusive smart eldercare services, with the aim of narrowing the digital divide and supporting active aging.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Jingwen Lin, Haotong Han, Zihan Liu, Xinyi Zhu, Mengran Yu (Author)
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