Author: Dr. Lanning Tian, Chairwoman of Zhongguancun SSIDC Smart Health and Senior Care Industrial Alliance
The broader definition of health in the age of longevity faces challenges such as rising healthcare costs.
The aging population and longer lifespans in the age of longevity are leading to changes in population structure. The extension of life expectancy is turning elderly people from a marginalized group into the mainstream. With declining birth rates, the number of people over 65 is increasing significantly. Changes in living environments, the invention of antibiotics, and other factors have extended life by decades. However, this also brings new social problems such as a decrease in the labor force, continuously rising healthcare costs, and an increase in suicide rates among the elderly. In the age of longevity, the concept of health is changing, and the definition of health is transitioning from a biological model to a bio-psycho-social model. Multiple elements such as living environments, lifestyles, and work styles contribute to this change. In the age of longevity, the definition of health is becoming broader, and a healthy person is not only free of diseases and disabilities in the present but is also expected to maintain a healthy state in the future.
Overcoming fixed ideas, life sciences, data, and technology play an essential role in healthy longevity.
In June 2022, the US National Institutes of Health and seven global institutions jointly released the Global Health Longevity Roadmap, emphasizing the role of data and technology in healthy longevity. Today, individual health survival years are approaching their actual lifespan, and the new generation of elderly people has good physical fitness and cognitive ability, enabling them to integrate into society and enjoy corresponding benefits. However, there are still many problems such as age discrimination, malnutrition, air pollution, infectious diseases, etc., which are affecting the arrival of the age of longevity. Fortunately, technological advances can develop more effective methods to improve the environment, treat diseases, and delay aging. At the same time, aging and health are unevenly distributed in different regions and individuals, so we need to break through prejudices and limited cognition to fully understand the age of longevity. The progress of life sciences can unlock the potential of life, and data and technology can participate in the four waves of technology in an aging society, such as the application of digital technology, which is expected to improve healthy life expectancy at both individual and systemic levels. Emerging technologies will help solve the problems of fairness and inclusiveness caused by aging. The roadmap advocates that the whole society is a stakeholder and an actor, reducing age discrimination, improving housing, public spaces, infrastructure, and transportation, coordinating to promote social security and economic security, and effectively promoting the arrival of a healthy longevity society.
Moving towards the third stage of life, we need to learn to reshape ourselves.
Different stages of life have different characteristics, and it is necessary to design one's life accordingly. In the "third stage of life," individuals need to learn to shape their own life state, adjust their psychological state, and constantly pursue a healthy life. The third stage of life has universal characteristics such as seeking autonomy, longing for familial love, and pursuing healthy longevity, and the need for health is more evident. The current elderly care service ecosystem requires close connections among government, public welfare organizations, hospitals, research units, services, elder ability assessors, and directors. Active communication and integration of production, study, research, and application are needed to form a friendly ecological environment for elderly care to meet the arrival of the age of longevity.
Finally, I hope that through the platform of the alliance, international cooperation, and coordination can be carried out to promote social innovation in the age of longevity.
