Improving the quality of life of older adults and fostering broader social adaptability and inclusiveness toward these age groups have become central tasks in China’s proactive response to population aging and its efforts to build an age-friendly society. With the rapid advancement of digital technologies, policy goals such as the informatization of elderly care services, the promotion of smart elderly care, and the development of an intelligent elderly care industry have been introduced in succession, outlining initial pathways for empowering the elderly care sector through technological progress.

Deep empowerment, urban–rural coordination

Digital and intelligent technologies are expanding access to daily life services and health management support for older adults, enhancing their autonomy and agency. An age-friendly society—one that enables acceptance and social inclusion of older populations—must not only meet older individuals’ personalized needs and improve their subjective well-being at the micro level, but also promote fair resource distribution at the macro level, establishing age-friendly institutions and cultivating a culture of care across society. Digital–intelligent technologies are particularly well suited to advancing this agenda: Through digital information integration and intelligent management and decision-making, they can vertically support the establishment and improvement of China’s multi-stakeholder elderly care system, while horizontally extending the coverage of services.

Vertically, digital–intelligent technologies can empower the establishment and optimization of China’s three-part elderly care system, which integrates home-, community-, and institution-based care. The development of smart platforms covering the primary living environments of older adults—homes, communities, and care institutions—serves two main functions. First, data can be collected at scale to support the digital operation of services such as resident management, health monitoring, and safety protection within communities and care institutions, while facilitating data sharing across institutions.

Second, a wide range of everyday services—including shopping, meal delivery, housekeeping, in-home care, and emergency assistance—can be integrated via smart devices connected to cloud platforms, forming a service model in which in-home services are embedded in households and care institutions are embedded in communities.

Promoted by relevant policies, digital–intelligent technologies are now being widely deployed to create “15-minute smart elderly care living circles,” carry out AI-driven pilot social experiments and reforms in elderly care, and build smart nursing homes and virtual communities. Together, these initiatives are advancing multi-level, integrated smart elderly care.

Horizontally, digital–intelligent technologies can effectively extend the reach and boundaries of elderly care services within China’s urban–rural dual structure. First, relying on digital platforms, public services for older adults can integrate and channel digital resources to rural areas, enabling the intelligent, age-friendly delivery of frequently used public services—such as e-government, social security and social assistance, citizen convenience services, benefit eligibility verification, and healthcare—while facilitating cross-departmental data sharing and the creation of a unified urban–rural elderly care database.

Second, through upgrades to rural infrastructure, the government can build a network of rural elderly care services and ensure the efficient transmission of demand data and service delivery. The deployment of medical AI systems, such as those developed by DeepSeek and Huawei, can help overcome geographic constraints in rural areas, helping balance the development of elderly care services across urban and rural China.

Aging-driven, inclusive sharing

In an era in which population aging and digitalization are deeply intertwined, technological empowerment is reshaping the lifestyles of older adults in unprecedented ways. Beyond meeting their practical needs, it is also opening new avenues for the silver economy, with broader implications for economic growth and wealth creation. With the active participation of the government, businesses, and social organizations, emerging elderly care sectors—such as financial services, smart products, and intelligent health and wellness services geared toward older adults—are thriving. They contribute to the accumulation of uniquely vibrant “silver wealth” while also boosting productivity in other industries, generating and amplifying positive value.

In February 2025, the International Electrotechnical Commission released a China-led international standard for elderly care robots. The move underscores China’s growing position at the forefront of technological model development and AI-driven digital–intelligent empowerment, while highlighting its continued use of these technologies to advance development in an aging society.

An age-friendly society is both a social ecosystem and a digital-intelligent ecosystem. Its “friendliness” is reflected not only in the continuous use of technology to meet the needs of older adults, but also in the synergy between the wisdom of older generations and the digital intelligence enabled by technological progress. Across social groups and industries, productive activity will increasingly center on value creation distinctive to the “silver era,” extending the benefits of social, economic, technological, and cultural advancement more broadly across society.

Wu Zhengyang is from the School of Public Administration at Jilin University of Finance and Economics.