Abstract

Due to declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy, the world’s population is ageing at an unprecedented pace. This demographic change is expected to exert pressure on social security as well as healthcare systems and poses the risk of social exclusion of the elderly. As urban areas are home to the majority of the global elderly population, they are disproportionately affected by this development. Cities have begun responding with strategies ranging from policy and regulation reform to investments in innovative healthcare technologies with the goal of becoming “age-friendly”. Enabling the elderly to live a socially active, healthy and self-determined lifestyle past retirement are among the prime objectives for alleviating the challenges of an ageing society. With increasing urbanization, human, technological and infrastructural resources of urban contexts or neighborhoods have presented themselves as important determinants of elderly well-being. We propose that an age-friendly digital neighborhood platform can activate and leverage these re-sources to the benefit of the elderly population, contributing to the mitigation of the challenges of an ageing society. Following a design science research approach, we develop design principles for such an age-friendly digital neighborhood platform and evaluate a prototypical instantiation in two case neighborhoods in a German metropolitan area.

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