Pudong explores "AI + elderly care" integration with elderly care vertical large models and intelligent robots

In Pudong New Area, the pacesetter of national reform and opening up, a new-era long march toward deep aging in a megacity is entering deep waters. The district's registered elderly population has exceeded 1.159 million, with an aging rate as high as 33.5%, and the heavy care burden for the advanced-aged living alone and the disabled and dementia-afflicted rests on its shoulders; the manpower bottleneck and supply-demand contradiction facing traditional elderly care are forcing grassroots governance to seek new ways to break through. Pudong dares to venture and try, tackling difficulties, and relying on the region's leading science and innovation resources and innovative endowments, it is the first in the city to knock on the door of "elderly care + artificial intelligence" integration, using the finesse of algorithms, computing power and embodied intelligence to open a new chapter in megacity elderly care. The Pudong New Area elderly care vertical large model human-machine PK competition is held. Xu Cheng "AI Empowers Silver Age" benefits the elderly. In late autumn Pudong, osmanthus fragrance fills the air. On October 20, a unique "AI Empowers Silver Age · Human-Machine Competition" elderly care vertical large model human-machine PK competition sounded the drums of battle. At the center of the stage, the atmosphere was both lively and tense; on one side were the "gold-medal elderly care advisors" carefully selected by Pudong from more than a thousand frontline workers, who know policy procedures well and are familiar with the warmth and coldness of neighborhood life; on the other side was the "digital brain" deeply trained on Pudong's computing power platform and integrating massive citywide elderly care knowledge—a professional elderly care vertical large model. The competition questions were closely tied to some of the most frequent real livelihood pain points at the grassroots level. When the judges posed chain questions such as "if a disabled elderly person only has urban and rural resident insurance, how can they apply for long-term care insurance assessment and medical-nursing combined bed subsidies," the gold-medal advisors responded calmly and analyzed the policy points in detail; the large model was likewise unwilling to be outdone, taking only seconds to precisely retrieve multi-level policy databases at the national, municipal and district levels, integrating information such as application eligibility conditions, assessment cycles, subsidy amounts at each level, and vacant beds around the elderly person's household registration into concise answers, and even generating application and appointment procedures. This kind of human-machine "sparring" scene is by no means for showing off skills, but directly confronts the long-standing chronic problems in elderly care policy consultation of "data not connected, answers inaccurate, scenarios not deep," letting technology undergo the most rigorous real-world test in complexly interwoven, even dialect-tinged real contexts. Behind this high-level human-machine competition lies Pudong's profound exploration of a new model of elderly care services. "The core of elderly care services is always people. We promote 'AI + elderly care' not to replace people, but to empower people," said a relevant person in charge of the Pudong New Area Civil Affairs Bureau, expressing the hope that AI can become the "eyes" and "ears" of elderly care advisors, nursing staff, community workers and family members of the elderly, assisting them in making more precise judgments, so that more time and energy can be devoted to warm, deep emotional companionship and spiritual care. Based on the results of the human-machine PK competition, Pudong is advancing iteration of the large model with a goal of over 95% question-answering accuracy, and packaging more than ten typical businesses such as nursing home admission, medical accompaniment services, meal assistance appointments, and home care into independent yet collaborative Agent services, so that demands raised by the elderly online in a sentence of dialect or a voice message are instantly transformed into offline closed-loop services, truly letting data run more and the elderly worry less. Biyun Yiyang Nursing Home welcomes intelligent robots. Image provided by interviewee. Intelligent products land vividly. If the large model arena competition tested the wisdom of machines, then inviting intelligent devices into nursing homes and integrating them into daily life is the necessary path for technology to take root and sprout. To solve the industrial pain points of disconnection between research and use and insufficient product adaptation, during this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Pudong grandly unveiled the "Shanghai Pudong New Area Silver Economy Science and Technology Innovation Experiment Center" and the "'Elderly Care + Artificial Intelligence' Real-Scenario Laboratory," opening up the real beds and daily care resources of elderly care institutions across the district, allowing R&D teams and devices to go directly down to the frontline of care to "learn by doing." Walking into the daily care area of Chuansha Nursing Home, the subtle changes brought by technology can be seen everywhere. In the corridor, an intelligent driving wheelchair developed by Deyin Intelligence glides smoothly; elderly people with limited mobility can avoid obstacles independently by gently pushing the joystick or giving simple voice commands. In the bedroom of a severely disabled elderly person, a fully automatic urine and stool care machine works quietly, using imperceptible automatic sensing and warm-water washing and drying to preserve the elderly person's dignity and decency. When night falls, Qinglan inspection robots replace night-shift caregivers in patrolling each floor, sensing in real time sudden situations such as elderly falls and abnormal bed-leaving, and transmitting warning signals to front-desk staff on duty at the first opportunity. Looking next at the Expo Homeland Nursing Home and Zhoujiadu Community Comprehensive Elderly Service Center, technology has become soothing physical and mental therapy. In the rehabilitation activity room, upper-limb, lower-limb and stroke hand function training robots developed by Siyi Intelligence are neatly in place; elderly people in the stroke rehabilitation period put on flexible exoskeleton gloves and practice grasping and extending under gamified screen guidance, making boring rehabilitation exercises full of fun. Along the corridor of the sunroom, several white-haired elderly people sit around the Zhuoyide fully bionic robot and the Timi companion robot; the elderly chat about daily life, and the robots respond delicately through natural and fluent tones, and also rely on embedded health agents to measure vital signs for the elderly; nearby, another elderly person, under the guidance of a caregiver, wears an advanced ultrasound regulation device, using non-invasive acoustic means to gently regulate chronic diseases. These vivid daily scenes are not ready-made exhibits achieved overnight, but fruits polished through thousands of hours of rigorous real-world testing relying on the real-scenario laboratory. Today, in three major bases including Chuansha Nursing Home and Expo Homeland Nursing Home, numerous intelligent products from more than ten enterprises receive the most "picky" usage feedback every day from elderly "experience officers" and frontline caregivers. For example, based on the conversational habits of the elderly, Zhuoyide has loaded a health steward system with more empathy and interactive flexibility into its simulated humanoid carrier. To thoroughly remove grassroots institutions' safety concerns when trialing cutting-edge equipment, Pudong also partnered with Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance to launch the country's first "elderly care robot product comprehensive liability insurance," using the confidence of institutional innovation to escort technology as it races boldly forward in real elderly care scenarios. AI products featuring intelligent companionship at the Shanghai Elderly Expo. Photo by Liu Xin. Cultivating a "rainforest" of the silver economy. The abundant fruits in the real-world laboratory are rooted in the fertile soil of Pudong's region-wide science and technology innovation industry. As the core area for Shanghai to build an international science and technology innovation center, Pudong has a deep accumulation in three leading industries: integrated circuits, biomedicine, and artificial intelligence. It not only gathers leading enterprises such as MicroPort and Fourier, but also relies on two major clustering carriers, the Shanghai Rehabilitation Assistive Devices Industrial Park (Zhangjiang Park) and the Pudong New Area Smart Elderly Care Industrial Park, to open up a complete chain from underlying algorithms and core component manufacturing to complete machine assembly and pilot testing and evaluation, forming a development ecosystem of "nursery—incubator—accelerator—industrial cluster." In the construction practices of Zhangjiang AI Town and Quantum City, technology-enabled elderly care has become a normal part of people's livelihood that permeates the fabric of the community. The Xiaobai conversational robot from Huihua Technology has been sent into the homes of elderly people living alone in the community, listening to the voices of the elderly day and night and building a new warm line of defense for community companionship and home-based elderly care. Around Zhangjiang Robot Valley, Deyin Technology's smart wheelchair has taken the lead in exploring a lightweight travel mechanism of "smart shared leasing," allowing ordinary working-class families to enjoy cutting-edge travel technology at extremely low rental costs. The Zhangjiang Town Community Affairs Service Center has introduced a dedicated algorithm recommendation system, enabling the previously cumbersome and complex policies benefiting the elderly to proactively identify eligible seniors. At the same time, the Pudong Civil Affairs Bureau has proactively seized the opportunity of national strategy, packaged together the clustering scenarios of Zhangjiang Industrial Park and the practical applications of the real-world laboratory, and actively applied for the Ministry of Civil Affairs' national-level rehabilitation assistive devices super scenario, striving to upgrade Pudong's smart sample into a demonstration source that leads the nation. Online, the "Pu Lao Hui" comprehensive service platform, with registered users exceeding 470,000, continues to iterate, encompassing all-round medical and elderly care matching and also expanding into a one-stop silver-haired mall; offline, the "Silver-Haired Technology Life Festival" and product supply-demand promotion meetings, held regularly in conjunction with festivals such as Double Ninth, let high-tech equipment "walk out" of the laboratory so that ordinary people can see, touch, and use them well. An integrated ecosystem for the silver-haired industry, with "government, industry, academia, research, and application" closely interlocking and online and offline efficient coordination, is growing vigorously on the east bank of the Pujiang River. An elderly person tries out a smart driving wheelchair. Photo provided by the interviewee. Planning ahead to solve difficulties. At present, cutting-edge elderly care technology still faces practical difficulties such as relatively high initial manufacturing costs, tight budgets of small and medium-sized elderly care institutions, and the lack of unified age-friendly software and hardware interfaces and safety evaluation standards in segmented tracks. Facing these challenges, Pudong New Area plans ahead and solves each problem one by one. At the level of policy supply, Pudong plans to fully incorporate the silver-haired economy and smart elderly care development into the new area's "15th Five-Year Plan" fiscal support framework, promote the transformation of fiscal policy from "subsidizing the supply side" to "subsidizing the demand side," and ease the procurement burden of institutions and families by providing precise subsidies for the construction of smart elderly care homes and the implementation of technology scenarios. At the level of institutional norms, Pudong actively calls for and fully cooperates with the municipal level in formulating a citywide unified industry evaluation system for software and hardware access, data interoperability, and information security, so as to build a strong defense line for the personal privacy of the elderly while breaking down the data silos built by various manufacturers and reducing the trial-and-error costs of grassroots selection. At the level of application ecology, Pudong will continue to accelerate the outbound evaluation and market transformation of mature products in the real-world laboratory, promote deeper "software-hardware integration" coordination between embodied intelligent hardware devices and vertical large models, and form a closed-loop virtuous cycle of R&D iteration, scenario verification, industrial implementation, and feedback to people's livelihood. Now in Pudong, "elderly care + artificial intelligence" is no longer a concept at the technical level, but has been integrated into the gliding of wheelchairs in the morning at care homes, the laughter in daytime rehabilitation rooms, and the silent watch of inspection robots late at night. Pudong is using scientific and technological innovation as its oar and breaking the waves forward with the responsibility of a pioneer, writing a new-era answer sheet for a megacity in responding to population aging.