China's Smart Elderly Care Industry Enters a Blue Ocean Era: Plan to Cultivate Over 100 Leading Enterprises Within Three Years

Recently,Ministry of Industry and Information Technology、Ministry of Civil Affairs,National Health and Family Planning CommissionThree Ministries Issued the “Smart Elderly Care IndustryDevelopment Action Plan (2017–2020)》(hereinafter referred to as the "Action Plan"), signifying a smart elderly care market of trillion-yuan scaleThe market is about to open up.

China is currently in a stage of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population aging. With continuous changes in the ecological environment and lifestyles, there is an insufficient supply of health and elderly care resources, coupled with a low level of information technology application, making it difficult to meet the people’s growing demands for health and elderly care services. The introduction of this Action Plan aims to accelerate the development of the smart health and elderly care industry, foster new industries, new business formats, and new models, promote growth in information consumption, and drive the transformation and upgrading of the information technology industry.

The action plan points out that leveraging new-generation information technology products, such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and smart hardware, formsSmart Health and Elderly Care Ecosystem, enabling effective linkage and optimized allocation of individuals, families, communities, institutions, and health and elderly care resources, promoting the intelligent upgrade of health and elderly care services, and enhancing the quality and efficiency of health and elderly care servicesrate level.

toBy 2020, a smart health and elderly care industry system covering the entire life cycle will be basically established.Establish over 100 demonstration bases for smart health and elderly care applications，Cultivate more than 100 industry-leading enterprises with demonstrative and guiding roles，Develop a Portfolio of Smart Health and Elderly Care Service BrandsSmart health and elderly care services, such as health management and home-based elderly care, have been basically popularized, with significant improvements in the quality and efficiency of smart health and elderly care services. The development environment for the smart health and elderly care industry has been continuously improved, with 50 standards for smart health and elderly care products and services formulated, and a substantial enhancement in information security assurance capabilities.

The action plan includesFive Key Tasks, Including Promoting the Research and Development of Critical Technology Products and Their PromotionSmart Health and Elderly Care Services, strengthen the development of public service platforms, establish a standard system for smart health and elderly care, and enhance the construction of smart health and elderly care service networks as well as cybersecurity safeguards.

Six Key Directions for Technology Product R&D

To address diverse application environments such as households, communities, and institutions, we will develop health management wearable devices, portable health monitoring devices, self-service health screening devices, intelligent elderly care monitoring devices, and home service robots, thereby meeting the diversified and personalized needs for healthy aging.

· Key Focus of Health Management Wearable Devices:Health Bands, Health Watches, Wearable Monitoring Devices. Emphasize continuous monitoring and early warning management of health status information, including blood pressure, blood glucose, blood oxygen, and electrocardiogram (ECG).

· Key Focus Areas for Portable Health Monitoring Devices:Integrated and Standalone Smart Health Monitoring Application Toolkit for Households, Family Physicians, and Community Medical Institutions. Emphasizes real-time monitoring of various physiological indicators in home and mobile scenarios for remote health management.

· Key Focus of Self-Service Health Screening Devices: For Use in Community Institutions and Public SpacesSelf-Service Intelligent Health Monitoring Device. Emphasize convenient basic health status testing to enable anytime, anywhere, and self-service access, enhancing users’ ability for self-health management.

· Key Focus of Smart Elderly Care Monitoring Devices: In Home-Based and Institutional Elderly CareIntelligent wheelchairs, monitoring beds, and other smart devices for monitoring, rehabilitation, and caregiving, and preventing wandering in patients with Alzheimer's diseaseHigh-Precision Indoor/Outdoor Positioning Terminal. Emphasize enhancing users’ capacity for self-directed elderly care and self-management, thereby improving the utilization efficiency of social and familial elderly care resources.

· Key Focus of Home Service Robots: EmbodiedIntelligent service robots with functions such as household chores, emotional companionship, entertainment and leisure, disability assistance, and security monitoring., emphasizing the improvement of elderly people's quality of life through modern home entertainment.

· Health and Elderly Care Data Management and Service System: Application ofInformation technology means such as the Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big dataPromote the integration of smart health and elderly care application systems, facilitating connectivity with medical institutions and elderly care service resources at all levels; develop data management and intelligent analytics systems for health and elderly care to enable intelligent interpretation, analysis, and processing of big data in this field.

7 Key Promotional Services

· Chronic Disease Management: Development of condition monitoring, medical record management, personalized assessment, trend analysis, diagnostic and treatment recommendations, abnormality alerts, emergency assistance, and rehabilitation services.

· Home-based Healthy Aging: Development of health check-ups, home environment monitoring, remote caregiving, family care and support, health interventions, and health assessment feedback.

· Personalized Health Management: Development of data collection, health planning, health education, health monitoring, disease diagnosis, risk screening, and health information inquiry.

· Internet-based health consultations: Leveraging internet platforms to develop online consultations, appointment scheduling, pre-consultation guidance, and post-consultation follow-up.

· Daily Living Care: Leveraging internet-based platforms to provide seniors with smart, convenient services such as housekeeping, meal preparation, and grocery purchasing, as well as mutual-aid elderly care services including companionship and personal care.

· Informatics Services for Elderly Care Institutions: Development of wireless positioning and emergency assistance, fall detection, nighttime monitoring, intelligent behavioral analysis, anti-wandering systems for patients with dementia, intelligent video linkage, access control system integration, mobile positioning, and consumption and entertainment services for elderly residents within facilities.

· Promote innovation in smart health and elderly care business models: Fully leverage the role of market entities, explore diverse operational models such as private operation with public assistance, enterprise self-construction and self-operation, and public construction with private operation; encourage investment from social capital; advance an operational mechanism wherein the government ensures the procurement of basic and guaranteed services, while the market allocates resources for high-end and personalized demands; foster win-win outcomes among users, terminal device manufacturers, system integration platforms, health and elderly care institutions, and third-party service providers; and establish sustainable, replicable, and mature business models.

Establishment of Three Major Public Service Platforms

· Technical Service Platform: Establish a Smart Health and Elderly Care Innovation Center to address the insufficient supply of common industry technologies and continuously innovate the industrial ecosystem. Integrate resources from academia, research, industry, and healthcare sectors to promoteKey Technologies, Core Components, and Priority ProductsR&D, improveProduct Testing and Certification, Intellectual Property Protectionand other services, to enhance the collaborative innovation and industrialization capabilities of the smart health and elderly care industry.

· Information Sharing and Service Platform: Fully leverage existing health information, elderly care information, and other platforms to build a unified, standardized, and interoperable system based on the regional population health information platform.Health and Elderly Care Information Sharing System, actively promote information sharing, in-depth development, and rational utilization among various health and elderly care institutions and service providers, and carry out in-depth mining and application of big data in health and elderly care.

· Innovation Incubation Platform: Supporting the Smart Health and Elderly Care SectorEntrepreneurship support platforms such as crowdsourcing, crowd-creation, crowd-support, and crowdfundingConstruction, EncouragementNew types of crowdsourced innovation spaces, such as makerspaces, startup cafes, and innovation factoriesDevelopment and promotion of the establishment of a batch of smart health and elderly care industry ecosystemsIncubators, Accelerators, providing startups withSupport in terms of funding, technology, market application, and promotion。

Establish a Smart Health and Elderly Care Standard System

· Establish unified standards for device interfaces, data formats, transmission protocols, and testing metrology to enable open sharing of data and information across different devices.

· Prioritize the development of standards for products and data services related to smart detection devices for five major categories of common physiological health indicators: blood pressure, blood glucose, blood oxygen, heart rhythm, and electrocardiogram (ECG), applicable to individuals, families, and communities.

· Improve the process specifications and evaluation index system for smart health and elderly care services, and promote the standardization and normalization of smart health and elderly care services.

· Formulate information security standards for smart health and elderly care, as well as specifications for the management and use of privacy data.

Network Construction, Cybersecurity Assurance

The action plan points out that we should strengthen the construction of broadband network infrastructure, byBy 2020, urban household broadband access capacity reached 100 Mbps., to build a smart health and elderly care service network covering homes, communities, and institutions.

Another key point is to implement cybersecurity protection requirements for smart health and elderly care service platforms, enhancing capabilities against cyberattacks, viruses, and data theft. Strengthening personal information protection, ensuring data security, and enforcing strict data management and security controls are all essential tasks for cybersecurity assurance.