The rapid aging population presents challenges inevitable to societies around the world. More emphasis on balancing technology with human values, particularly in elderly care, will allow innovations to genuinely serve the people they are intended to support.
Opening the sub-forum “Technological innovation for Aging Societies in the Context of Globalization and Local Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities of Care” of the 2025 Shanghai Forum with a video message, Arthur Kleinman, Honorary Director of the Fudan-Harvard Center and a key proponent of social technology, pointed out that fields like engineering, design, anthropology, and healthcare need to work together to make sure the tools we create actually help senior citizens to overcome mobility, memory, or emotional hurdles.
Ethics and Emotions: Money, Memory, and Media in Urban Institutions
SHEN Yan, lecturer from School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University, provided a narrative from the ethics perspective based on long-term fieldwork in nursing homes. Through poignant case studies, she explored the tension between financial arrangements and emotional fulfillment in late-life care, and it comes to a sobering fact that elderly residents often framed their familial relationships through stories of betrayal, obligation, and ambivalence, with money becoming a proxy for affection and power. To make things even worse, outsourced care through gifts or packages, although materially sufficient, can result in emotional detachment.
It’s natural to raise the ethical question: whether absentee care (which refers to the support provided to employees who are absent from work due to illness, family caregiving, or other personal issues) enabled by technology can truly be “present”, followed by a calling for a broader rethinking of care, dignity, and relational time in aging societies. Solutions are in urgent need, and that is when Graeme Were, Professor of Anthropology at SOAS University of London, explained what innovative role private museums can play as special spaces of memory and internal care.
Drawing from fieldwork in Vietnam, he describes how ex-prisoners built personal museums to commemorate fallen comrades, sustain intergenerational memory, and facilitate “dialogues with the dead”. Subsequently, he drew parallels between museum curation and eldercare, noting how both involve careful preservation, emotional labor, and ethical storytelling. Eldercare solutions must be conceived beyond biomedical or functionalist logics, incorporating cultural, spiritual, and mnemonic dimensions. Museums, functioning as media of past tense, can build a safe harbor of care, memory, and ethical obligation.
Innovative Care: Practices Grounded to Earth
What is it like to realize elderly care in the context of multi-dimensional social time? LIU Jieyu, Professor of Sociology and China Studies at SOAS University of London, presented findings from a large-scale EU-funded project on three-generation family life across multiple locations in urban and rural China. Her framework exposes an evolving dynamic shaped by cultural tradition, rural to urban migration, gender roles, and gaps in institutional support. Notably, there are multiple temporal dimensions of care—including institutional time, biological time, extended family time, migration time, and process time vs. clock time—highlighting how care practices are affected by state welfare reform, labor migration, and life course conflicts.
Given these temporal, emotional, and social complexities, how to bring the power of technology into full play remains a question. Categorizing social technology innovations into local models, CHEN Hongtu, a longtime collaborator in the Harvard initiative “Social Technology for Aging Societies”, provides pragmatic plans with cases from Thailand. For instance, MEDEE launched by Chiang Mai University’s School of Lifelong Education is a digital learning platform that empowers healthy older adults to re-enter the workforce by teaching digital skills through peer-to-peer learning. Besides, a community wellness platform called YoungHappy combines online and offline services to reduce emotional suffering, such as elderly loneliness and urban detachment.
Living Lab: Shanghai for Institutional Design
A two-decade research by LIU Chunrong, Director of the Fudan-Nordic Center, traced the evolution of Shanghai’s “9073” eldercare model—90% home care, 7% community-based, and 3% institutional care—as a hybrid governance innovation rooted in local mobilization and flexible experimentation. It’s a community-based eldercare development contextualized with successful pilot programs, focusing on inter-bureau collaboration between health, civil affairs, and social organizations. Following grassroots experimentation is institutionalization, where bottom-up dynamic wherein community networks and local champions drove eldercare reform, later scaled by municipal governments.
It’s time to envision the integration of technology and humanistic values based on real-world cases. PAN Tianshu, Professor from the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan, pictured a future where development and application of technology in eldercare are effectively oriented to manifest ethical principles and a profound understanding of human needs and values.
Supposing the very best solution is yet to come, we cannot contest, by discovering a passage combining perspectives from every possible realm of intelligence, the inestimable benefits conferred on the aging society. The prospect, anchored in human-centered aging innovation, is never confined to a single solution. But bear the fact in mind — whether through co-designed digital platforms, reimagined institutions, or relational ethics, innovation always starts from one principle: to care is to be human.
(END)
Writer: ZHANG Xinyue
Proofreader: WANG Jingyang
Editor: WANG Mengqi, LI Yijie
