In October 2026, Liangjun SONG, Associate Professor at the Fudan Development Institute, published a commentary in Legal Daily on smart elderly care and digital adaptation for older people, arguing that technology should take the initiative to “bend down” to fit the needs of older groups. Reviewing the evolution of China’s elderly care policies, the article notes that from helping older people cross the “digital divide” in 2020, to systematically laying out the smart health and ageing industry in 2024, to explicitly accelerating the development and application of ageing technology and informatization in 2025, the policy focus has shifted from “helping older people use technology” to “letting technology protect older people”. This change is essentially a profound shift in governance logic: from a “gap-filling” approach centered on training and assistance to a “system-building” approach that embeds age-friendly requirements into technology R&D and product design, so that technology proactively adapts to older people’s physical functions, cognitive habits and living scenarios. In community- and home-based elderly care, technologies such as intelligent sensing and health monitoring are being embedded in a seamless way, building a protective network covering families and communities. The article also stresses that age-friendly transformation must go beyond hardware optimization to “soft” institutional reforms, including establishing an ex-ante assessment mechanism for the age-friendliness of policies and strictly regulating the boundaries for collecting and using older people’s personal information, so that “protection” does not degenerate into “surveillance”. SONG argues that the ultimate goal of smart elderly care lies not in how advanced the technology is, but in ensuring that older people live with dignity, choice and participation; only by repositioning older people from a “needs-based” to a “rights-based” perspective and making technology truly serve people can China achieve a well-provided, productive and joyful old age in responding to population ageing.

Translated by FDDI

Full text in Chinese available at:

https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/20/d8/c18965a794840/page.htm