Assistive Technology to Address Restricted Mobility

As the Chinese population gets older, the need to support healthy and dignified aging becomes more urgent. 13.5% of Chinese peoples were older than 65 years according to the 2021 National Census [Jizhe, 2021] which is a significant increase from ten years prior when this age group represented 8.9% of the population [Wei, 2019]. As larger groups of these people advance in age, they will face increased incidences of serious disability. In China, as a cohort ages from 65 to 80 the proportion affected by serious disability will increase from 18% to 50%. While concerning, these trends present an opportunity and motivation to identify new approaches for helping elders overcome deteriorating capabilities.

This project aims to understand problem areas related to the restricted mobility experienced by the elderly in China and in the US, in carefully selected settings, with a view to identifying expressed and latent demand for a spectrum of technology solutions, as well as for nontechnical solutions of an organizational or informational nature.

Immersions with a broad spectrum of relevant constituencies will be the primary tool through which demand discovery will occur. Constituencies will include, where possible, the elderly directly, their caregivers, their physicians and other healthcare providers, representatives from hospitals and other care facilities, providers of existing technology solutions to aid mobility, insurers, regulators. We will proceed under the assumption that there is insufficient current regulatory (and insurance) support for these kinds of interventions in the short run (though we hope that the broader project will help us generate advocacy for such intervention in the longer run). Immersions will proceed sequentially in selected locations with appropriate ecosystem partners, rendered feasible by careful preparatory work, and augmented by subsequent follow-on interviews and surveys. This will be the primary initial tool for demand discovery, which will precede hypotheses development, concept development and preliminary testing. Technology uses cases include tech for movement assistance, exercise quantification, physical & behavioral activity monitoring as well as physiological monitoring of the sort that have been developed at SEAS research groups, but will also surface broader use cases, for example, use of point of care diagnostics, personalized medicine, remote health monitoring and use of telemedicine. There are already numerous such at-scale interventions in China (for example, Ping An’s Good Doctor platform or Ask Bob app) and there is an opportunity to consider the next generation of these types of systems through new technological innovations and human-centric design approaches.

The research team is focused on technology approaches that can satisfy three requirements: 1) The technology development goals should be ambitious, but a mature prototype capable of real-world deployment should be feasible within 2-3 years. 2) The category of needs addressed should fit within the core capabilities of the participating SEAS labs (this includes movement assistance, exercise quantification, physical & behavioral activity monitoring, physiological monitoring, remote healthcare, and other related disciplines). 3) Careful ethnographic research and human-centered approaches are applied to ensure that the technology is a clear example of well-considered social technology solutions.

The outputs of this project will be aligned with a social technology approach through the needs they address and the methodologies used to develop them. We are focused on helping elders and their caregivers overcome the physical and emotional challenges that come with advancing age, and in doing so improve their access and participation in essential social systems. To avoid thrusting technology solutions onto elders and their caregivers that may not be aligned with their cultural, cognitive, or physical needs we are starting with an extensive and technology-agnostic review of their needs before then finding areas of aligned research we can prototype and test at escalating levels of maturity.

For the first phase of this project, we gathered data from interviews, a workshop with experts and stakeholders, and literature reviews. Data from all sources was synthesized into 20 user needs addressable by technology solutions.