China's demographic shift is accelerating, with the national population aged 60 and above surpassing 320 million by the end of 2025, representing 23.0% of the total populace. The National Health Commission projects that by 2035, the country will enter a phase of severe aging, leading to a continuous rise in the number of disabled and semi-disabled elderly, which in turn magnifies the strain on family caregiving and widens the gap in eldercare service provision. This deepening demographic trend imposes immense practical pressures on social security, care services, health management, and age-friendly consumption, transforming proactive responses to population aging from an option into an imperative question that societal development must answer.

Amid these multifaceted challenges, the central question facing society is how to deliver universally accessible and affordable eldercare services to the broad elderly population at a relatively manageable cost. The tension between service supply and payment capacity profoundly affects the tangible outcomes of eldercare initiatives. Yet, within this pressure lies a vast opportunity; eldercare is no longer merely a safety-net welfare undertaking but has evolved into a trillion-yuan silver economy sector spanning healthcare, education, technology, and consumption. Industry consensus suggests that the period of the 15th Five-Year Plan will be pivotal for structuring China's eldercare industry, with talent supply, smart products, service models, and business models all clarifying their development trajectories through practice, accelerating the formation of the industrial landscape.

For the high-quality development of the eldercare sector, talent cultivation serves as the foundational pillar. For years, the industry has grappled with a substantial shortage of skilled workers and inconsistent professional capabilities among practitioners. Industry estimates indicate a talent gap of over 5 million core eldercare service professionals in China, starkly contrasted by the insufficient number of certified care workers to meet the needs of numerous disabled and semi-disabled seniors. This talent deficiency persistently hampers efforts to enhance service quality and expand capacity. In Shenzhen, municipal departments including the Education Bureau and the Civil Affairs Bureau provide coordinated oversight, working closely with the Shenzhen Chinese Vocational Education Society to jointly advance industry-education integration and skills training for eldercare personnel. Leveraging a collaborative platform built for the Shenzhen eldercare and childcare sector, the government plays a role in policy guidance and resource coordination, partnering with vocational colleges, state-owned health and wellness enterprises, and research institutions. They are exploring talent supply pathways that combine order-based and apprenticeship training, integrated work-study practical training, and vocational skill level certification. Multiple entity-based training bases have been established to shore up the eldercare human resources shortfall, channeling nursing and health management workers to the front lines of care.

Meanwhile, the domestic embodied intelligence industry is advancing rapidly, with eldercare robots and smart care equipment moving swiftly into application scenarios. Experts believe that the proliferation of eldercare robots will redefine job requirements and skill sets for care workers. The industry must strengthen training for practitioners in smart technology applications, cultivating compound talents capable of skillfully coordinating and operating multiple eldercare robots to deliver care services. This exploration of a "human-plus-robot" collaborative care model uses technology to amplify the efficiency of care personnel, alleviating the strain of insufficient manpower. The core focus of the eldercare industry ultimately revolves around two critical dimensions of daily living for seniors: exercise and nutrition. As age advances, the physical functions, metabolic rates, and chronic disease profiles of the elderly exhibit significant individual differences, rendering standardized mass-market food increasingly inadequate for their health needs. Demand is surging for personalized dietary plans that are low in sugar and salt, nutritionally balanced, and tailored to specific dietary restrictions. Ensuring scientific, safe, and suitable nutrition is a vital safeguard for quality of life in later years.

In Beijing's Fengtai District, leveraging its digital-intelligent food industry foundation, local authorities are exploring new avenues to apply technology to people's livelihood and eldercare. The Fengtai District government, in collaboration with Haier Group, promotes the Digital-Intelligent Food Ecology Conference. At the second global conference of this kind, held in August 2026, the nation's first digital-intelligent food AI agent, FoodlinkBrain, was unveiled, equipped with capabilities such as providing personalized dietary recommendations and full-chain traceability of food ingredients. This technology is specifically designed with pathways for expansion into community eldercare and senior meal assistance scenarios. In the future, it can integrate the geriatric nutrition research findings of Shanghai Jinshan Organization to embed chronic disease-appropriate dietary plans and age-friendly food selection capabilities into community eldercare service systems. This approach aims to address the challenge where community senior meal services offer standardization but lack personalization, using digital technology to safeguard seniors' health at the dining table.

Proactively addressing population aging requires not only strengthening care service supply but also securing the safety baseline for home-based eldercare. Home-based care remains the choice for the vast majority of China's elderly, yet the risk of solitary seniors falling or falling ill without anyone noticing remains a prominent safety concern. The "Safe Dwelling Guardianship" digital application scenario, led by the civil affairs department in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, employs a model of government leadership, social participation, and market coordination to construct a round-the-clock digital safety net for home-based seniors. The project targets elderly groups at higher risk, including the very old and those living alone, providing free installation of a trio of smart monitoring devices: fixed alarms, infrared human-body sensors, and door-magnet sensors. Additional devices, such as smoke detectors and sleep monitors, can be added as needed. Operating without requiring complex interactions, the system relies on unobtrusive IoT technology to capture abnormal signals within the home. Monitoring data is consolidated onto a unified guardianship platform, establishing three defense lines for pre-incident warning, in-process response, and post-incident follow-up. With 7x24-hour monitoring, if risk signals, such as a door not being opened for an extended period, are identified, the system simultaneously pushes alerts to platform duty personnel, family members, and community grid workers. Jointly with service personnel from Hangzhou TeYouAi Company, rapid on-site verification and handling procedures are initiated, forming a complete loop of "online intelligent alerts, offline social worker response, and professional institution supplementation." This approach moves emergency safeguards directly into seniors' homes, using digital methods to address security gaps in home-based eldercare.

Talent development as the foundation and technology as the enabler are jointly reshaping the landscape of China's eldercare sector. Whether it's Shenzhen's industry-education integration delivering frontline care capacity, Fengtai's use of AI to upgrade senior dietary services, Shanghai Jinshan Organization's dedication to nutritional standard research for the elderly, or Hangzhou's "Safe Dwelling Guardianship" weaving a dual safety net of technology and human care, they all illustrate a common principle: responding to population aging neither relies solely on the simple expansion of manpower nor blindly pursues technological concepts detached from real-world livelihood needs. Integrating education with industry to fill talent gaps ensures professional care capacity reaches the front lines, while the deep penetration of digital technology into eldercare scenarios helps expand the boundaries of inclusive services while controlling costs. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, persisting with the coordinated advancement of the eldercare cause and the eldercare industry, simultaneously driving talent cultivation and technological innovation, and uniting social organizations and market entities in a concerted effort, are essential to continually expand the supply of inclusive eldercare services and truly realize the goal of ensuring that hundreds of millions of elderly are well-supported and secure in their later years.