# Aging-Friendly Community ## expand\_more The Aging-Friendly Community study fosters design innovation to enhance the built environment and quality of life for an aging population. China, through its National Health Commission, is developing thousands of aging-friendly communities in the next few years. This research project was led by Professor Ann Forsyth and her team from Harvard Graduate School of Design. The goals of the project were to (a) review past successes of aging-friendly community programs, (b) identify how program needs and successes have been measured, and (c) propose a suite of tools to test in Nanjing or elsewhere. Associated research would (d) examine new and emerging topics that may not yet be incorporated into such programs and measures e.g., climate change, more substantial built environment measures. Aging-friendly communities are popular programs internationally but there has been little work to assess the performance of different programs in terms of how these programs bring positive outcomes for older individuals. We hope that using the Lishui Baseline Survey and environmental audits can help us understand the situation in Lishui to help propose age-friendly strategies and perhaps evaluate them later. This work draws on our draft review of aging-friendly community evaluations. Academic work on technologies for older people has tended to focus on assistive and other technologies to use as individuals and in the home. Our focus is on examining the broader environment in terms of neighborhood and city scales as well as looking at collective spaces. This is an area of much current development in terms of smart cities, but there is little literature specifically considering aging. We are looking at two topics. • One starts with places: What makes a successful community for aging? How well have Age-Friendly Community programs worked? How might social technologies help? This project has aimed to set up an evidence-base and data collection tools for implementing an age-friendly community approach that incorporates social technologies. Two literature reviews frame the substantive context. Our draft article reviewing evaluations of age-friendly communities globally is providing a menu of strategies used by more successful programs. This will be extended, in another literature review underway, to look more specifically at the situation of aging in place in China to assess where social technologies might help enhance wellbeing and quality of life. • The other starts with technologies: How might new technologies change the way older people use their neighborhood, municipal, and metropolitan environments as they age in place? What urban planning and design barriers stop people from using these more widely and effectively? How can social technologies help older people remain at home (vs. nursing home) safely, effectively, and comfortably? In this project, we identified current and emerging technologies globally that can help aging-in-place at the neighborhood and city scales. This inventory, produced as an article currently under review, maps out a wide range of technological devices already in use as well as areas where technologies could be developed. We found that these technological devices cross many domains though focusing on mobility and safety; more could be done in the areas of social connectedness and health promotion. They perform two main functions, monitoring and intervention or assistance. The literature review about aging in place in China will further help us identify areas where technologies could help enhance wellbeing. In the longer term this work can have two main outcomes. First, given many technologies already exist it can provide a roadmap for a coherent and integrated approach to integrating social technologies to help older people, with a pilot project in Lishui. Second, we hope this work inspires others in the team to consider developing new urban scale technologies. Overall, our team will help the larger group see how social technologies can fit in physical spaces.