Search Results (2,017)

The implementation of the new national electric bike (e-bike) standard has imposed stringent compliance requirements on equipment and e-bikes in the instant delivery sector, which directly affects the delivery efficiency and the work adaptability of food delivery riders. This study aims to investigate food delivery riders’ continued usage intention of e-bikes under China’s new e-bike regulation. Based on valid data collected from food delivery riders in Nanjing, this study employs ordered logit regression to examine the primary factors influencing their continued usage intention of e-bikes. The findings reveal that: (1) Male riders’ willingness to continue using e-bikes is comparatively lower, whereas older riders show a stronger intention. (2) Food delivery riders with higher incomes and those who need to replace their e-bikes show a stronger inclination to continue using them. (3) Limited e-bike options have a significant negative effect on riders’ continued usage intention, while speed limits exert no significant influence. Based on these empirical findings, corresponding policy recommendations are proposed to promote riders’ continued use of e-bikes, such as developing age-friendly delivery models, establishing an income guarantee mechanism for riders, and optimizing platform delivery time allocation. The findings could provide a theoretical basis and practical insights for policymakers and food delivery platforms to improve e-bike management policies. Full article

Background: As China enters the digital era and actively promotes an active aging strategy, smart wearable devices have become increasingly prevalent among older adults; however, their impact on health inequality remains unclear. This study investigates the association between smart wearable devices and health, as well as health inequality, among Chinese older adults, and further examines the mediating roles of joy of living and social participation. Methods: Data were derived from two waves (2018 and 2020) of the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS), with a final sample of 7098 adults aged 60 and above. A two-way fixed-effects model, propensity score matching–difference-in-differences (PSM-DID) approach, and mediation analysis were employed. Results: Smart wearable devices were significantly positively associated with both health and health inequality among older adults in China. Mediation analysis revealed that joy of living and social participation played an intermediary role. Conclusions: This study provides preliminary evidence that smart wearable devices are associated with health and health inequality among Chinese older adults. Policy efforts should focus on developing more user-friendly devices, promoting digital literacy among older adults, and supporting disadvantaged groups. Furthermore, the mediating effects suggest that fostering joy of living and encouraging active social participation may serve as effective pathways to improve health. Full article

The sustainable renewal of old residential communities faces increasing challenges in addressing the diverse environmental needs of older residents while respecting spatial constraints. Conventional approaches often treat older adults as a homogeneous group, overlooking how functional and social heterogeneity shape spatial perception. To address this gap, this study examines perceptual priorities in micro-public spaces of old residential communities in Qingdao, China, by classifying 60 community-dwelling older adults into four profiles using the Successful Aging framework. Participants performed free-viewing tasks using eye-tracking to observe 18 areas of interest (AOIs). Results reveal a clear perceptual hierarchy structured by individual profiles. Older adults with lower functional ability (Q3, Q4) allocate significant visual resources to safety-critical elements as a form of compensatory monitoring. Conversely, a systematic perceptual shift from survival-oriented assessment to quality-oriented evaluation was observed as functional and participatory reserves increased. High-participation groups (Q1, Q3) prioritized comfort facilities, while esthetic features attracted sustained attention primarily among the high-function/high-participation group (Q1). These findings provide empirical evidence for differentiated micro-renewal strategies that prioritize perceptual stress reduction and affordance enrichment in old residential communities. Full article

The current global population aging trend has intensified, especially in rural areas. As vital spatial carriers supporting multiple activities of older adults, rural human settlements have become key settings for addressing the challenges of aging. However, current efforts to improve rural human settlements primarily focus on enhancing the overall appearance of villages. This approach fails to adequately address the specific needs of older adults. Chongqing is a typical mountainous city, facing deep aging and significant regional disparities. It is also confronted with realities such as spatial fragmentation, scattered facilities, and low service accessibility. So Chongqing urgently requires systematic assessment and targeted interventions. To transcend the traditional one-size-fits-all governance in rural human settlements, the concept of “rural human settlements for aging” is introduced in this article, to establish an age-sensitive governance logic. Based on 2023 cross-sectional data, this article evaluates the level of the rural human settlements in Chongqing by establishing an index system, and employs global spatial correlation and local spatial correlation to analyze the spatial correlation patterns. The geographic detector model and the obstacle degree model are used to delve into the key obstacle factors influencing and hindering rural human settlements. The results indicate that despite exhibiting a pronounced spatial clustering pattern, spatial disparities remain quite evident. The spatial differentiation presents a pattern of “high in the west and low in the east, led by a single core area.” Elderly service facilities constitute the main external obstacle. The relationship between social security and family support within welfare systems represents the primary internal obstacle. Transportation conditions serve as the key interactive obstacle. Based on an analysis of the primary obstacles in each region, the promotion strategy is categorized into three types: facility enhancement type, characteristic amplification type and comprehensive upgrading type. This article aims to advance the transformation of rural human settlements from “universal design” to “age-friendly design.” It provides a reference framework for rural human settlements development in the context of an aging population. Full article

Transportation-disadvantaged (TD) populations, including many older adults and people with disabilities, often face mobility barriers linked to fragmented transportation services, limited information about available ride options, and weak coordination across providers. While One-Call/One-Click (1C1C) systems have emerged as solutions to centralize transportation information, support trip planning, and coordinate services across public, nonprofit, and private actors, their capacity to scale remains limited. Using a mixed-methods design, this study examined the institutional arrangements, functional scope, and service scale of 67 operational 1C1C systems to identify systemic barriers to expanding coordinated service access. Quantitative analysis revealed substantial variation in governance, service configurations, costs, and coverage relative to conservative population-based benchmarks, with most systems operating at limited scale. Qualitative interviews with system administrators provide explanatory insight into these patterns, identifying three recurring institutional constraints: funding instability, limited capacity for technology and data integration, and shallow vendor networks for specialized transportation services. The findings indicate that limits to 1C1C performance are rooted in institutional and financial conditions rather than system design. Situating coordinated transportation within the Age-Friendly Cities framework, the study argues that mobility coordination must be treated as durable public infrastructure if equitable, age-friendly mobility is to be achieved at scale. Full article

In China’s stock-based renewal agenda, many old residential communities display pronounced intergenerational overlap, in which grandparental childcare becomes a dominant pattern of outdoor-space use. Against the backdrop of age-structure shifts, population ageing, and persistently low fertility, community-level outdoor-space supply, distributive equity, and environmental adaptability have become key concerns in renewal practice. Yet, practitioners still lack a rankable, low-cost, and implementable evaluation-to-decision workflow. Using Xingshe Community in Dalian, China as an empirical case, this study establishes and tests an integrated “NLP–AHP–GBDT” assessment framework. Guided by policy discourse and planning theory, over 50 semi-structured interviews were processed via NLP-based semantic analysis and keyword mining to derive a two-tier indicator set (criterion and indicator layers). Seven specialists then applied the analytic hierarchy process to elicit indicator weights, and a resident survey was administered to generate weighted performance scores for diagnosing deficiencies. In the feedback-validation stage, we adopted both a qualitative Framework Method and a quantitative GBDT approach, first using the Framework Method to conduct feedback validation based on community residents’ open-ended evaluations. Subsequently, gradient boosting decision trees were used for supervised verification with renewal-scenario data, providing empirical backing for the weighting scheme and the resulting priority order for interventions. The findings suggest that outdoor spaces are broadly serviceable but fall short in intergenerational friendliness, reflecting a structural misalignment between intergenerational activity patterns and spatial provision. Based on the validated priorities, the study proposes modular, incremental micro-renewal measures focusing on safety and emergency accessibility, environmental comfort and caregiving–recreation coupling, and place identity with community organizational mobilization. Full article

Background: As populations age and digitalization accelerates globally, understanding whether digital inclusion can enhance the economic well-being of older adults is critical for achieving sustainable development. However, empirical evidence on the mechanisms linking digital life to sustainable income among older populations remains limited. Design: This study utilizes data from the 2023 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), comprising 3127 respondents aged 55 and older. We employ ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with city fixed effects, instrumental variable estimation, and mediation analysis to examine the impact of digital life on income and its underlying mechanisms, with a focus on sustainability outcomes. Results: Digital life significantly enhances income levels among older adults, a finding robust to endogeneity and sensitivity checks. Heterogeneity analysis shows stronger effects for rural seniors, those in western regions, and older women. Mediation analysis reveals that digital engagement boosts income through four pathways—employment, material capital, social capital, and human capital—each contributing to the economic sustainability of aging populations. Conclusions: Digital inclusion serves as a mechanism to transform seniors’ dormant assets into productive capital, thereby promoting sustainable income and contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). Policies should prioritize targeted digital literacy training, age-friendly platform design, and integration with social protection systems to foster inclusive and sustainable aging societies. Full article

Against the backdrop of population aging, community parks are important spaces for older adults’ daily activities, and perceived safety plays a key role in shaping their use and spatial satisfaction. This study selected six typical community parks in central Beijing, constructed an indicator system for safety perception needs, and applied an analytical KANO–IPA (Integrated Kano and Importance-Performance Analysis) approach to identify the demand attributes and optimization priorities of safety elements. The results reveal a clear hierarchy in older adults’ safety perception needs. Basic environmental and facility safety factors, such as pavement conditions and facility reliability, function as must-be needs. Elements related to spatial visibility, circulation, lighting, and wayfinding act as one-dimensional needs that steadily influence satisfaction, whereas features including natural surveillance, spatial enclosure, and activity atmosphere mainly enhance spatial experience as attractive needs. Priority analysis further indicates that circulation conditions and facility safety constitute the most critical aspects for improvement. Overall, older adults’ safety perception in community parks results from the combined effects of multiple spatial factors. Hierarchical spatial optimization can enhance user experience and improve resource allocation efficiency. The findings provide theoretical support and decision-making guidance for safety-oriented planning and age-friendly renewal of urban community parks in aging societies. Full article

Under the global trend of population aging, providing a safe and reliable living environment for the elderly who live at home has become a major social issue. This study reports a monitoring technology for elderly-friendly residential buildings based on distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and distributed temperature sensing (DTS), which is used to monitor and identify the physical behaviors of residents and temperature changes at different locations in the space. The results show that the distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) system can initially identify typical behavioral states such as walking, squatting, and falling. The fiber DTS technology can not only monitor the temperature distribution at different locations indoors, but also be used for the monitoring and early warning of local fires in different areas of the room. The sensing probes of the monitoring system proposed in this paper are linear optical cables, which have the advantages of easy installation, strong anti-interference ability, intrinsic explosion-proof, less likely to leak residents’ privacy, all-weather operation, precise event location, and low cost for large-scale distributed measurement systems. By integrating the sensing optical cables, fiber signal processing systems, and application software introduced in this paper, an intelligent management and early warning platform for elderly-friendly residential buildings can be established, providing a new solution for remote supervision of the living safety of the elderly. Full article

Background: Early childhood caries (ECC) affects a substantial proportion of young children worldwide, and timely screening is essential for early intervention and referral. While deep learning has shown promise for automated dental diagnostics, many existing approaches rely on computationally heavy models that limit deployment in community and mobile settings. This study investigates whether compact convolutional neural networks can achieve clinically meaningful performance for screening dental caries from oral photographs. Methods: We curated a dataset of 435 intraoral images from children aged 3–14 years, annotated by licensed dentists, and performed patient-level stratified splitting to prevent data leakage. Three convolutional neural networks (ResNet-18, MobileNetV3-Small, and EfficientNet-B0) were fine-tuned using ImageNet-pretrained weights and comparatively evaluated for the detection of dental caries from oral photographs. Models were trained with class-weighted cross-entropy loss and evaluated on a held-out test set using sensitivity, specificity, balanced accuracy, ROC-AUC, and PR-AUC with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals. Results: ResNet-18 achieved the highest balanced accuracy (0.929), weighted F1-score (0.954), and perfect sensitivity (1.00), while EfficientNet-B0 achieved the strongest threshold-independent discrimination with the highest ROC-AUC (0.978) and PR-AUC (0.990). MobileNetV3-Small maintained competitive performance (ROC-AUC 0.952; PR-AUC 0.976) with substantially lower computational complexity. Conclusions: In addition to performance evaluation, we incorporated an interpretability analysis using Grad-CAM to examine model decision behavior. The resulting attribution maps predominantly highlighted clinically relevant tooth regions associated with caries, providing evidence that the models rely on meaningful dental features rather than background artifacts. These results demonstrate that compact, deployment-friendly architectures can achieve clinically meaningful performance for ECC detection, supporting their suitability for scalable, real-world screening applications. Full article

Against the backdrop of accelerating urbanization and population aging, urban parks have emerged as significant venues for enhancing the physical and mental well-being of older adults. The age-friendly quality of these spaces is directly linked to health equity and urban inclusiveness. Using the high-density historic district of Beilin in Xi’an as a case study, we developed an innovative assessment tool to evaluate the age-friendliness of park walking environments. Guided by the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) framework, this tool integrates subjective perceptions and objective data to diagnose environmental strengths and weaknesses across four dimensions: accessibility, safety, comfort, and health-related interactivity. Based on multi-source data and quantitative analysis, the study revealed key variations in the age-friendly attributes of different parks. Our field assessment focused on three representative park types: urban comprehensive, historic–cultural, and community leisure parks. The key findings are: (1) Safety was perceived by experts as the most critical dimension for older adults’ health experience, with a weight of 0.49, accounting for nearly half of the total. However, significant variations exist in safety quality across different types of parks. (2) Age-friendly performance differed profoundly among park types. Benefiting from systematic management, the urban comprehensive park achieved balanced performance and a total score of 84.87. In contrast, the historic–cultural park, constrained by its linear morphology and historical functions, scored the lowest at 66.03, exhibiting notable deficits in safety and comfort. The community leisure park, while vibrant in community activity, attained an intermediate score of 74.76 due to insufficient attention to safety details. (3) The assessment outcomes highlight the association of park typology, site selection, and design sophistication with the lived experience and potential health benefits for older adults. This study provides a refined evaluation tool and tailored optimization strategies for the age-friendly renovation of diverse park types. Full article

Background/Objectives: The healing rate of wounds resulting from postoperative abdominal surgery interventions increases as the inflammation and infections in the wound are reduced. However, antibiotic resistance among microorganisms increases the incidence of surgical site infections (SSIs). Therefore, the need for new products that exhibit antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activities, in addition to antibiotics, is increasing. Methods: Silver nanoparticles (CO-AgNPs) were obtained using the green synthesis technique with Cydonia oblonga L. leaves, which constitute a significant amount of waste, and the effects of the obtained nanoparticles on in vitro wound healing were determined. Results: It was observed that CO-AgNPs inhibited myeloperoxidase and collagenase, enzymes that negatively affect wound healing. Furthermore, they exhibited good antimicrobial activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, and Staphylococcus aureus, which are common hospital pathogens. The CO-AgNPs could exhibit enhanced wound-healing properties by inhibiting microorganisms. Conclusions: It was clear that the development of new, environmentally friendly, and biocompatible products containing CO-AgNPs could be feasible, particularly for wound healing following infected abdominal surgery. Full article

As population aging accelerates, age-related declines in visual sensitivity and attentional control make older drivers more vulnerable to suboptimal in-vehicle interface designs. Head-up displays (HUDs) are intended to reduce gaze shifts by overlaying information within the forward field of view, yet empirical evidence remains limited on how specific HUD presentation strategies reshape older drivers’ visual attention allocation. Grounded in theories of visual attention and cognitive load, this study systematically investigates three design variables that are increasingly common in contemporary HUDs (including AR-HUDs): (1) dynamic versus static navigation cues, (2) pedestrian warning strategies under different lighting conditions, and (3) the spatial placement of high-priority information. We first conducted a formative user study to define variables and operationalizations, and then carried out three within-subject driving-simulator experiments using controlled HUD stimuli and eye tracking. Objective gaze measures (e.g., fixation count, total fixation duration, and time to first fixation) were combined with subjective preference ratings to characterize attentional capture, search efficiency, and potential attentional costs. Findings reveal a robust trade-off: continuously changing navigation cues enhance attentional capture but can also increase attentional “stickiness,” unnecessarily consuming older drivers’ limited attentional resources. In pedestrian hazard tasks, real-time overlay warnings that were spatially aligned with the hazard significantly improved visual localization under low-light conditions, outperforming early warnings and multi-stage strategies. Across tasks and layout conditions, the central HUD region showed a stable attentional advantage—placing critical information centrally elicited greater visual attention and stronger subjective preference. These results provide mechanistic evidence for how HUD parameters modulate older drivers’ attention and yield actionable implications for prioritization, temporal pacing of dynamic navigation cues, and a “center-first” layout strategy to guide age-friendly HUD design. Full article

Integrating health-oriented physical activity into community-scale walking environments is a key strategy for promoting healthy aging within sustainable urban development. However, community walking environments are often planned and managed without systematic evaluation frameworks to determine whether daily walking conditions effectively support health-oriented physical activity. To address this gap, this study proposes a planning-oriented health effectiveness assessment framework that translates exercise prescription principles into spatial, functional, and managerial performance indicators. Based on the Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type, Volume, and Progression (FITT-VP) exercise prescription framework, a multi-method approach was adopted. Evaluation indicators were identified through a structured literature review and refined using the Delphi method. User perception differences were incorporated using the Kano model, and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) was applied to quantitatively evaluate and rank the health effectiveness of community walking environments. The framework was empirically tested through a case study of Binshui communities in the Jimei District of Xiamen, China. The outcomes imply that priority indicators include progression route planning integrity, interval training feasibility, multifunctional training area match, monthly maintenance frequency, nighttime illumination uniformity. Community walking environments can function as effective everyday planning instruments for promoting physical activity among aging populations when exercise science principles are systematically embedded into urban design and management. By operationalizing exercise prescription principles as planning performance criteria, this study advances sustainable urban planning research and provides an evidence-based assessment tool for age-friendly neighborhood regeneration and community health governance. Full article

Digital solutions and social media platforms for older adults are widely associated with positive social and health-related outcomes. However, empirical evidence on their sustained use remains limited, particularly from a usability and accessibility perspective. Previous reviews have primarily examined social media use in later life from social or psychological perspectives, whereas this review focuses on digital inclusion and psychosocial well-being from a technological and ICT-oriented perspective. The aim is to examine how technological and design-related factors may help explain gaps between reported benefits and actual usage among older adults. It also seeks to support researchers and designers in understanding why many digital platforms fail to sustain long-term engagement despite reported initial benefits. The review further identifies areas where emerging approaches, such as AI- or VR/AR-supported (XR) systems, could be explored in future research. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, studies published between 2005 and 2025 were reviewed to identify key technological and user-related factors that influence online participation among older adults. Findings indicate that barriers related to digital literacy, accessibility, and usability are frequently associated with reduced engagement. At the same time, the potential role of user-friendly and well-designed platforms is often implied rather than empirically examined. Although inclusive and adaptable systems are widely discussed, explicit HCI- and interface-level usability evaluations remain surprisingly rare. None of the included studies examined AI- or XR-related features of social platforms. This indicates that ageing and social media research have yet to empirically address emerging technologies that increasingly shape online interaction. The review underscores the need for accessible and adaptable technological solutions that promote digital engagement and emotional well-being among older users. Full article