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Opportunities and Challenges of Urban Agetech: from an Automated City to an Ageing-Friendly City

Seng W. Loke

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of aging populations by proposing urban agetech as a city-scale, automated framework to support elderly autonomy beyond the home. It articulates two visions of an automated city—integration of robot-based services within existing urban life and a city built as a machine with embedded automation—and uses scenarios and personas to illustrate practical needs and solutions. A key contribution is the exploration of humanoid robots as an integrative platform (the Swiss Army Knife vision) alongside a distributed mix of devices, with attention to safety, interoperability, and ethical considerations, including the emergence of PMR standards. The work aims to guide policy, design, and engineering toward human-centered, scalable, and maintainable deployments that preserve the human touch while expanding mobility, social participation, and independence for older adults.

Abstract

Caring for the elderly, aging-in-place, and enabling the elderly to maintain a good life continue to be topics of increasing importance, especially in countries with a higher percentage of older people, as people live longer, and care-giving costs rise. This position paper proposes the concept of urban agetech, where agetech services beyond the home can be an integral part of a modern ageing-friendly city, and where support for the elderly, where needed, in the form of automated systems (e.g., robots and automated vehicles) would be a normal city function/service, akin to the rather commonplace public transport services today.

Opportunities and Challenges of Urban Agetech: from an Automated City to an Ageing-Friendly City

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of aging populations by proposing urban agetech as a city-scale, automated framework to support elderly autonomy beyond the home. It articulates two visions of an automated city—integration of robot-based services within existing urban life and a city built as a machine with embedded automation—and uses scenarios and personas to illustrate practical needs and solutions. A key contribution is the exploration of humanoid robots as an integrative platform (the Swiss Army Knife vision) alongside a distributed mix of devices, with attention to safety, interoperability, and ethical considerations, including the emergence of PMR standards. The work aims to guide policy, design, and engineering toward human-centered, scalable, and maintainable deployments that preserve the human touch while expanding mobility, social participation, and independence for older adults.

Abstract

Caring for the elderly, aging-in-place, and enabling the elderly to maintain a good life continue to be topics of increasing importance, especially in countries with a higher percentage of older people, as people live longer, and care-giving costs rise. This position paper proposes the concept of urban agetech, where agetech services beyond the home can be an integral part of a modern ageing-friendly city, and where support for the elderly, where needed, in the form of automated systems (e.g., robots and automated vehicles) would be a normal city function/service, akin to the rather commonplace public transport services today.
Paper Structure (5 sections, 2 figures)

This paper contains 5 sections, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Two Visions of the Automated City
  2. Agetech Today and the Future
  3. Scenarios and Personas
  4. Humanoid Robots as a "Swiss Army Knife" of Robots?
  5. Challenges and Conclusions

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Agetech beyond the home.
  • Figure 2: The top row of images illustrates robots helping the elderly beyond the home (the last image on the right shows a robot accompanying an elderly person who can still drive, but the robot can take over at any time) [images generated using https://openart.ai/]. The second row of diagrams first illustrates the layered architecture of apps (which need to be designed to be elderly friendly) that allow access to city services/functions, and then the architectural layers of management and coordinated robot services to accomplish the city functions and services. The diagram on the right illustrates the vision of a city as an AI/machine for people to live in, with many components – a complex system of inter-woven cooperative robots/systems; effectively the automated aspects of a city is a robot with many Internet-connected disjointed/separate physical components but all connected to a central controller; scaling up a 'machine for living in': living in a smart home, a smart building, and a collection of smart buildings with connecting autonomous transport infrastructure, and eventually, a smart (automated) city.