Health

Building a New Paradigm for Healthy Aging with Digital Intelligence

2025-12-05   

With the increase of the elderly population, the health issues of the elderly are becoming increasingly prominent, and the construction of healthy aging has become a hot topic of concern for all parties. While digital technology has significantly improved the efficiency of health management, it has also given rise to new risks such as digital health inequality and fragmented digital health governance, posing challenges to the inclusiveness, fairness, and synergy of healthy aging construction. Healthy aging in the digital era is not only an issue of "enabling" technology innovation to promote the health of the elderly, but also an issue of "rights" whether the elderly can equally enjoy the dividends of the digital era, and also an issue of "governance" to support Chinese path to modernization with high-quality population development. In recent years, technology has provided strong impetus for the development of elderly health, but the synergy between healthy aging and the digital society needs to be improved. On the one hand, the mismatch of digital health technology affects the functional performance of elderly individuals. In terms of technological iteration, hardware devices and software applications in the field of digital health generally have the characteristics of lightweight, sensitivity, and high-frequency iteration, objectively posing challenges to elderly people whose functions continue to decline. In terms of product supply, due to the stage of technological development and actual application level, some digital health products have problems such as fragmented content and shallow research and development, and have not fully covered the full cycle, diversified, and dynamic health needs of the elderly population. In terms of service orientation, digital health services sometimes overlook the demands of the elderly population for dignity maintenance, emotional connection, and social participation in the pursuit of maximizing efficiency, exacerbating their feelings of helplessness and loneliness. On the other hand, the fragmentation of digital health governance constrains the collaborative innovation efficiency of an aging society. At present, China's digital health governance has formed a "one body and two wings" development pattern, which is based on information construction and led by big data and "Internet+" services. However, the health aging governance in the digital era should further expand from the technical innovation in the medical health field to the systematic coordination of policy coordination, service supply and regulatory evaluation, so as to fully respond to the integrated service trend of "people's health as the center" and the demand for full life cycle security. In this regard, in the future, we should take "technology empowerment" as the driving force, "digital equality" as the goal, and "governance coordination" as the mechanism guarantee, comprehensively promote the organic unity of digital technology development and public health promotion. Empowering technology to achieve substantial improvement in elderly health functions. By combining the phased evolution of the health function status of the elderly, we aim to achieve digitalization in early prevention, precision in mid-term intervention, and humanization in later support. Through the intelligent transformation of physical space and the aging friendly cultivation of social and cultural environment, we aim to help the elderly deeply integrate into the digital health era. Strengthen the subjectivity of the elderly in health management, promote their shift from passive acceptance of health services to active use of technological tools for refined health management, and achieve the organic unity of cognitive autonomy and behavioral agency. Digital equality promotes inclusive sharing of elderly health and well-being. Digital equality "refers to the equal rights that different entities should enjoy in participating in the construction of a digital social community in digital survival and communication. Promoting 'digital equality' helps to promote equal access to digital technology, resources, and opportunities for the elderly, and to fairly enjoy the convenience and rights brought by digitalization. To strengthen the right to access digital health and ensure fair and accessible access to digital health resources. Integrate digital health infrastructure into national strategies such as comprehensive rural revitalization and regional coordinated development, and provide comprehensive guarantees in resource allocation, capacity building, and economic support. Enhance the autonomy of digital health decision-making and promote diversified digital health services for the elderly. Ensure the ability of elderly people to make independent choices, judgments, and actions in terms of information awareness, service selection, data management, and health decision-making. Maintain the right to digital health development and achieve the co construction and sharing of digital health ecology. Establish a normalized mechanism for the participation of the elderly in the formulation of digital health policies, promote the transformation of recommended standards in the field of digital technology for aging into mandatory national standards, and ensure the applicability and fairness of digital health services from the source. Collaborative governance promotes digital innovation in elderly health governance. Systematically implement policies from three dimensions: institutional design, subject collaboration, and regulatory evaluation, to achieve the transformation of elderly health governance from traditional decentralized construction to the integration of digital and intelligent systems. Strengthen the top-level institutional connection and vertical implementation mechanism of digital governance for elderly health, promote horizontal exchange of health data and collaboration among multiple subjects, and create an ecological system for the good development of digital health. Improve the supervision of the digital health industry and the evaluation system for digital governance of healthy aging, establish a comprehensive evaluation framework covering the degree of access to digital health services, actual usage efficiency, and the quality of experience of the elderly population, and strengthen the evaluation weight of key areas, key populations, and weak links to ensure that the achievements of digital health development benefit all elderly people fairly. The promotion effect of digital technology on healthy aging needs to be based on a continuously integrated public health service system, guided by the value concept and policy system of fairness and inclusiveness, and focused on the immediate needs and daily life scenarios of the elderly population. Only by deeply integrating technological rationality with humanistic care, fully respecting the subjective value of the elderly population, and always adhering to the principle of "putting people's health at the center", can we build a new paradigm of healthy aging that is age friendly and intelligent. (New Society)

Edit:Momo Responsible editor:Chen zhaozhao

Source:Health Report

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