Key Question: How to Scale Up Care for Older Adults Successfully?
As the global population ages, so does the demand for effective, scalable, and sustainable care solutions for older adults, creating critical challenges in healthcare and societal support systems. The "Scale-IT-up 2025" workshop aims to explore and expand the role of digital health technologies in addressing these challenges, specifically focusing on the shortage and burden of caregivers. We also encourage discussion of digitally enabled care concepts such as at-home hospitalization or virtual wards, which innovate traditional care concepts. This workshop will serve as a platform for researchers, technologists, and practitioners to share insights, innovations, and strategies for integrating digital health solutions into care for older adults.
We invite submissions that address the following themes:
- Development and implementation of digital health technologies (or other innovative technological solutions) tailored towards care for older adults (e.g., psychosocial support for caregivers, alleviating caregiver burden, supporting older adults, etc.).
- Digital health interventions facilitating health behavior change and habit formation.
- Digital health solutions for mitigating the demographic impact on the healthcare system.
- Scaling and Diffusion of Digital Health Solutions, including both the scaling of business models and regional diffusion.
- Design considerations of technology for older adults (e.g., value-sensitive design, ethics by design, etc.).
- Case studies on the effectiveness of digital interventions in care settings.
- Market analysis and industry engagement identify leading and emerging technology sector players in care for older adults.
- Transformative solutions moving traditional care into digitally enabled integrated care (e.g., at-home hospitalization).
Objectives: This workshop will facilitate multidisciplinary dialogue to:
- Explore well-established market leaders and top-funded early-stage companies shaping the future of care services for older adults.
- Engage with findings from interviews and assessments of these companies, providing a comprehensive view of current innovations and trends in the market.
- Highlight and disseminate cutting-edge research and practical solutions in digital health for older adults.
- Identify and discuss innovation patterns and lessons learned from successful digital health implementations.
- Foster collaborations between academia, industry, and healthcare providers to accelerate the adoption of new technologies.
Sub-Workshop: The Role of LLMs and Low-/No-Code Platforms for Scaling Up Care for Older Adults
Scaling up digital health interventions faces challenges beyond regulatory and financial barriers, including technical complexity and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration. Low-/no-code platforms offer a solution by simplifying software development, enabling faster adaptation to new disease scenarios, reducing time to patient benefit, and allowing clinicians to contribute more actively.
With the rise of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), combining these tools with low-/no-code platforms opens new possibilities for hyper-personalized care pathways and precision medicine. In particular, they could power conversational agents serving as digital therapeutics and acting as long-term coaches for older adults, supporting healthy aging and managing multimorbidity. However, realizing these potentials requires addressing important considerations such as data governance, ethical concerns, transparency, and ensuring the right technical and clinical expertise is integrated.
This sub-workshop aims to explore, discuss and systematize these opportunities and challenges how LLMs and low-code development can work together to improve and scale up digital health solutions. It is also planned to include an example show-case, demonstrating a prototype where these technologies work together to streamline the development of health interventions.
Outcome: The workshop aims to contribute to developing scalable, effective, and human-centered care solutions that can be integrated into existing health systems. Participants will understand how digital health technologies can transform care for older adults and provide support for caregivers.